Street interaction

Coming home by train last Friday night, the whole street in front of the train station (incl. side streets) was filled with one big solid traffic jam due to a broken down bus in the middle of the road. While I was walking down the road some of the cars further away started beeping randomly, intermittently. Am pretty sure these drivers couldn’t see the reason for this traffic jam. After a few seconds the beeping seemed to form a cascade of “Mexican waves” towards the bus. Spreading meme-like, more and more cars joined in until the entire street was temporarily filled with the uninterrupted, multi-timbre, solid, blaring sound of dozens of car horns. A chorus of drivers venting their impatience on rainy Friday night.

The whole experience almost felt like witnessing a special roadside remix of a Steve Reich piece and I couldn’t help thinking about these two things:

It was a perfect example of spontaneous temporary self-organization of drivers being influenced externally by the mood of their nearest neighbours. Similarly, in cellular automata macroscopic behaviour also emerges as the super-sum of rules applied locally. Our behaviour is easily changed by context of people and situations around us just as our own presence does influence the things and people (and their actions) around us. This is nothing new, but so far I haven’t that often come across situations where this is that plain obvious.

In the case of the beeping concert, it’s also interesting to see how limited our means of communication with the outside world still really are once we’ve placed ourselves within a vehicle. Not only has a car horn a pretty binary mode of operation, we’re also all aware of the symbolic character and connotations of its sound, once activated. A car horn in action demands attention, communicates urgency and danger, but in many circumstances also just plain anger, ignorance, impatience, nervousness etc. There’s simply no room for subtlety in using this “communication device”, especially if there’s a chorus of horns involved the voice of beeping seems to have shifted to the equivalent of shouting. We are spending more time in transit than ever and are living in a world of ever increasing traffic and transportation requirements. Many vehicles are equipped with GPS navigation, Bluetooth and on-board computers, yet our roadside means of communication still seem to be reduced to its most primal mode and reminiscent of barking dogs.

Is it maybe a simple lack of information about a sudden change of situation in our immediate environment which is causing or amplifying existing stress levels and the resulting behavioural expressions?

In a “Change happens” advert for Zurich Insurance a couple of years ago, hundreds of cars are seen crossing a major junction at high speed without any noticeable, physically present traffic lights or other mechanisms for traffic regulation. In such a future networked traffic scenario vehicles are exchanging positional and directional data in realtime and traffic becomes self-regulating. Lack of information there could cause truly fatal situations for vehicles in a much wider than local range. On the other hand this current flow of information would also enable other traffic participants to be informed about any breakdowns or accidents nearby and so allow people to take counter measures and/or give them time to mentally prepare themselves for a roadblock type scenario.

Note to self:

Keep the users and participants of a system informed about local contexts at all times.

(Re-blogged from my old, failed experiment at: http://environmentdictatesbehaviour.wordpress.com/)