Not A Blog™

The fad, these days, is green. Are you green? Is your car green? Do you eat green? Live green? Is your lifestyle sustainable? Are you making an effort to protect the planet and slow global warming and prevent widespread ecological armageddon? Someone who does not put forth this effort could be any number of things—apathetic, misguided, ignorant, or deliberately living in the moment—and none of these are good. Part of the problem is, of course, that simply by virtue of the fact that you live in a first-world country (most likely the case if you’re reading this), you do not live a sustainable lifestyle. The amount of infrastructure required to keep you alive is, in its current state, fundamentally unsustainable.

The ecological movement is curious if only due to the incredibly large number of people involved who are hypocrites. This is not to say their ideas are not good or necessary ones. They are. Rather, the attitude that “you must live the way I live or we’re all going to die” is indefensible, because extremely few people in America are carbon sinks. Better to say, “we must live this way,” and do not. Even though this is a case of “do as I say”, at least we have a goal to shoot for.

A bigger obstacle to living sustainably is the quality of life factor. Very few people ever lower their quality of life, and the vast majority continually seek to raise it. There are any number of rationalizations for this—some legitimate, some absurd—but the fact remains that few people want to give up a convenience they’ve taken for granted since birth, regardless of how “green” this could make the planet. I sure don’t.

There are only two solutions to overcoming this limitation in human behavior. One takes generations. If each subsequent generation is taught to be more and more frugal, eventually we will have a generation who would consider our current lifestyle to be offensive in its very nature. Unfortunately this takes hundreds of years, and manipulating the zeitgeist is hardly a science.

The other solution would be to get people to do things which are simultaneously more convenient and more green. They will be adopted because they are more convenient.

Most people are not able internalize a timespan of hundreds or thousands of years and the subsequent shift of a system over that time, and so while everyone says that sustainability and greenness are all fantastic, hurrah, there are not many people who actually have a real understanding of what’s going on. It’s not that people don’t care, they simply have no points of reference to the event (in this case, global warming), and it’s such a foreign concept from everything they know that the rhetoric alone is not sufficient enough to get them to change their actions.

But convenience is, because—as they say in Corporate World—it has immediate take-home value.

A few years ago, I had a game rather like Grand Theft Auto called Mafia. It was an amazing game—better than GTA in a lot of respects. The game was set during prohibition, in a fictional American city that was something like New York. You got to drive around all sorts of replicas of real cars from that time period, and complete mafia-type missions. It also had more realistic car physics, which I appreciate and respect on one level, but it is, sometimes, less fun.

Anyway, in this game, they did something I had never seen before. Most of the traffic signs were yield signs. I was curious to find out if this had actually been the case in the United States at one point, and as near as I can figure out, it never was. I think the reason for this is in the game is because part of driving around the city is obeying the traffic laws (the speed limit, for example), and enforcing every single stop sign probably made the game not fun. So you don’t have to stop for anyone so long as you don’t get in an accident.

Today, nobody stops at stop signs. I started to wonder if, perhaps, it would make sense to replace stop signs with yield signs. How would this affect traffic flow? I ran the idea by an acquaintance of mine, and he promptly shot it down. It’s bad enough, he said, that people run stop signs now. Legitimizing the behavior will only make the problem worse. At least stop signs get people to slow down, whereas people are just going to fly right through when they see a yield sign.

I’m not convinced this is the case. Some people might do this, but I think it would make most people slow down more because there would be no penalty for not coming to a complete stop. Think about it this way. If you run a stop sign and a policeman sees you, you get a ticket, regardless of how fast your rolling stop was. (Unless you just blast right through. That’s reckless driving.) So most people are going to slow down as little as possible and still try to qualify that as a rolling stop, because there’s no difference in leniency between a super-slow-crawl rolling stop, and a leisurely “hey, I tapped my breaks back there, buddy” rolling stop. If you’re going to break the law, might as well go for broke, within a reasonable amount of safety to your person.

But with a yield sign, there is no penalty for not stopping, unless you cause an accident. So the tendency, I believe, would be to slow down to the point where people feel comfortable, because there’s no penalty there. Sure, this is going to be less slow for some people, but it’s going to be more slow for others.

One problem this may cause is increased road rage, when someone in front doesn’t breeze through the intersection as fast as the person behind them thinks they should. That might cause problems. And also, there are some intersections (most four-ways, for example) where true stop signs are required. But replacing the majority of stops with yields makes the rest of the stops more important to a driver. It is no longer this default sign that gets slapped on every intersection. If we had yield signs, people would be more inclined to stop at the stop, because it’s no longer the default, and therefore more important in the driver’s visual lexicon.

For the most part, I think you need to give drivers credit, and I don’t think changing the majority of stops to yields is going to make the roads less safe. In any case, I think it at least warrants a study.

But more to the point of the article: the realization I had recently is that rolling stops are a lot more energy efficient. If you bring a car to a complete stop, you’re wasting a lot of energy by killing your momentum, and you have to build that up by burning additional energy to accelerate again. Another thing to consider, is that a series of stops cause people to accelerate rapidly between each one, in order to try and make up the lost time of coming to a stop every few hundred yards. If these were yields, people would be more inclined to coast because that is much more convenient, and the overall traffic flow would be more smooth. It would also use substantially less energy.

This one simple, convenient act could reduce carbon emissions. Think of how many cars needlessly come to a stop every day, all over the country, when a yield would suffice. Sanctioning the rolling-stop as a legitimate driving technique would save energy and fuel, and it would be less wear and tear on the cars, too. The only downside is the possibility of less safety—something we don’t even know for sure is the case because we’ve never studied it. Everyone just takes it for granted that stops are an indispensable safety measure, but we don’t really know. Maybe it would make the roads prohibitively more dangerous, but again, we don’t know. At the very least, I think it deserves a few experiments.

They will never happen, of course, because for all the convenience and greener Earth the rolling stop would provide, there is one thing it will provide less of: money. If the police can no longer fine people for running stops, not only is this less money in the pockets of the DoT, but it also means the police might have to engage in some actual police work, and that just wouldn’t do.

In other words, the government isn’t going to stop for green—but then again, neither should you.

-Ted

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