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”.