Part 2 of a multi-part series
How does this relate to architecture, urban planning, and landscape design? What does knowledge of pressure/volume pulses in the urban landscape do for the planner/designer? What can we learn from urban experiences in traffic flow and our emotional responses while driving? If we know how individuals generally react, how do we go about planning for this? Does it have to do with good urban design, compensation, or surrender to the sense that things are beyond our control?
Around my current residence, just Northwest of the central business district of downtown Salt Lake City, several issues slow down the pace of traffic, for me most noticeable in the evenings between 4:00 p.m. and 7 p.m. Traffic lights are paced in a way that seems always to go against the flow. I idle at each and every light. Even the usual well timed lights are paced in a way to impede continuous flow. One option for leaving the neighborhood I don’t usually use is Northwest, because the grocery stores to the East are closer and more familiar. There is no walkable grocery in this Northwest residential section between City Creek Canyon, which enters the city from the North and passes by the East side of the state capital, and I-15. The nearest grocery is 4-6 blocks West of the freeway.
Several aspects really impede flow. At dinnertime, just like in Park City, an international tourist destination town, everyone wants to go at the same time to the restaurants and grocery stores, and everybody shows up with the same hungry, impatient impulse. I enter this slow down with my own rising need to eat or shop for groceries, and get pinched by City Creek—which prevents flow East to the plurality of groceries 6 blocks in that direction—and all the downtown traffic emptying into the streets outbound through the various arteries north and west. Eastbound traffic is almost as bad, though if you drive far enough South, you will hit a moderately flowing Eastbound route.
Trax is but 2 blocks away, but this option means about an hour turnaround time to the most convenient supermarket and back. One might wonder why I am compelled to be on this schedule of having emotional or biological needs like hunger or the need to burn energy at about 5 p.m., when the immediate world around me is full of people in traffic, creating a potential for resonant stress through traffic, crowding and the like. My own impulses are naturally timed like most everyone else, and my schedule regularly coincides with the mass exodus from downtown.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Monday, April 7, 2008
Traffic Flow, Personal Flow, and the Built Environment
Part 1 of a multi-part entry
Flow is a very unique phenomena in psychological wellbeing. When we are in flow, as with an athletic activity, complex task, or any time we are completely immersed and engaged by the moment, flow experts tell us that we have a different sense of time, our mind tends to be fully engaged, and our emotions support a peak experience.
In the buildup to the 2002 Winter Olympics, I held a night job that made quite a good deal of money, and when I wasn’t immersed in the work, I was doing a lot of reading and thinking, especially in psychology. Delivering food in Park City from over 30 restaurants around town allowed me to experience the streets from the late afternoon mass exodus of ski resorts, jamming all the main arteries, to late evening, when the streets returned to their quiet, empty state.
I used the opportunity to observe how stress affected the kitchens of those restaurants, and the staff of nearly 100 hotels, resorts and bed and breakfasts. How was stress affecting the 12-20 customers I delivered to per night, 7 nights a week? After having earned a BA in English with a minor in History from the University of Houston, and starting a 10 year hiatus living off the grid outside of Park City, subsidized by high paying seasonal jobs, I was spurred to be watchful for meta-patterns, useful information to stow away for later.
While many of my confederates were immersed in drama—of their personal lives, the road, interpersonal conflict and misaligned expectations between restaurant and driver, driver and customer, I was immersed in how the high volume, high pressure experience at certain times of day in a ski destination town impacted everybody I came into contact with. Road rage was defined in the mid-60’s by a major change in the thinking of stress psychology. The experience of misaligned expectation, where we are behaviorally programmed to travel fast, are attached to that rate of flow, and react to incidences that fuel a sense of frustration in traffic, turned out to have a very unique signature.
Theories and research on stress up to the 1960’s focused primarily on physical experiences, modern stress research growing up around studies of soldiers coming out of WWII. Much of the clinical research models revolved around studies that experimented with putting an organism under intense physical stress, and observing how it would try to adapt, burn out, give up, and eventually collapse.
Road rage studies tied an apparently primitive instinct of the brain and body—fight or flight, a survival mechanism evolved to protect the physical body—with the ego instead. Road rage was theorized as evidence of the shift of the body’s hormonal (and neurochemical) fight or flight response from defense against threat to bodily harm, to defense against threat of harm to the ego. Anyone familiar with ego defense psychology knows the old Benson and Hedges commercial stereotypes well this tendency to react under pressure: We’d “rather fight than switch”.
Flow is a very unique phenomena in psychological wellbeing. When we are in flow, as with an athletic activity, complex task, or any time we are completely immersed and engaged by the moment, flow experts tell us that we have a different sense of time, our mind tends to be fully engaged, and our emotions support a peak experience.
In the buildup to the 2002 Winter Olympics, I held a night job that made quite a good deal of money, and when I wasn’t immersed in the work, I was doing a lot of reading and thinking, especially in psychology. Delivering food in Park City from over 30 restaurants around town allowed me to experience the streets from the late afternoon mass exodus of ski resorts, jamming all the main arteries, to late evening, when the streets returned to their quiet, empty state.
I used the opportunity to observe how stress affected the kitchens of those restaurants, and the staff of nearly 100 hotels, resorts and bed and breakfasts. How was stress affecting the 12-20 customers I delivered to per night, 7 nights a week? After having earned a BA in English with a minor in History from the University of Houston, and starting a 10 year hiatus living off the grid outside of Park City, subsidized by high paying seasonal jobs, I was spurred to be watchful for meta-patterns, useful information to stow away for later.
While many of my confederates were immersed in drama—of their personal lives, the road, interpersonal conflict and misaligned expectations between restaurant and driver, driver and customer, I was immersed in how the high volume, high pressure experience at certain times of day in a ski destination town impacted everybody I came into contact with. Road rage was defined in the mid-60’s by a major change in the thinking of stress psychology. The experience of misaligned expectation, where we are behaviorally programmed to travel fast, are attached to that rate of flow, and react to incidences that fuel a sense of frustration in traffic, turned out to have a very unique signature.
Theories and research on stress up to the 1960’s focused primarily on physical experiences, modern stress research growing up around studies of soldiers coming out of WWII. Much of the clinical research models revolved around studies that experimented with putting an organism under intense physical stress, and observing how it would try to adapt, burn out, give up, and eventually collapse.
Road rage studies tied an apparently primitive instinct of the brain and body—fight or flight, a survival mechanism evolved to protect the physical body—with the ego instead. Road rage was theorized as evidence of the shift of the body’s hormonal (and neurochemical) fight or flight response from defense against threat to bodily harm, to defense against threat of harm to the ego. Anyone familiar with ego defense psychology knows the old Benson and Hedges commercial stereotypes well this tendency to react under pressure: We’d “rather fight than switch”.
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