[sustran] Honey, you got to slow down.

[Eric Britton]

The Flicker Fusion Factor
Honey, you got to slow down (originally published in
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/opinion/nyregionopinions/13WEwinkler.html?emc
=eta1> The New York Times) 

By Robert Winkler http://pages.cthome.net/rwinkler/fff.htm 
 

The closest we come to free flight in our lives is not when we take off in an
airplane. It is when we drive our cars. The speed, altitude, centrifugal forces,
and sensations of flying that we experience in an SUV, a sports car, or, in my
case, an economy box, let us feel what it is like to be a bird. This partly
explains why we love our cars, preferring this mode of locomotion to any other,
even walking and running, for which we are supremely adapted.

 

Despite the high price of gas, we go everywhere in our cars, and, for most of
us, the faster we go the better. Posted speed limits are one of life's great
fictions. Virtually no one observes them. Whenever I do I can be sure a
tailgater will magically appear in my rearview mirror. Speeding is the norm, the
de facto law, and many motorists view anyone who observes speed limits as a de
facto lawbreaker or a wimp who deserves to be run off the road. Police
enforcement of speed limits is spotty at best. Meanwhile, road improvements, car
redesigns, and automaker advertisements are always nudging us to speed up.

 

In our cities and on the highways that feed into them, traffic volume alone
keeps speeding in check. In the suburbs, however, it's the Wild West. I
frequently observe motorists going 40 miles an hour or faster on winding side
streets. Many can't control their cars at such speeds, even those who drive
luxury sports cars. As they come around a sharp curve, they go into the lane of
oncoming traffic to combat the centrifugal force that threatens to fling them
off the road. If they encounter your car coming from the other direction, too
bad. You'll just have to move over. Suburban drivers who don't are asking for a
head-on collision.

 

Speed has become the driving force in our lives. Everyone is in a hurry-to get
to work, to get home, to drop off the kids, to pick them up, to get to the
supermarket, the post office, the dump, Wal-Mart. We must go ever faster, and we
must build gas-guzzling cars ever bigger and stronger to protect us in the
reckless chase for money and status. We pay lip service to the environment, then
fill up at the gas station. God help those who get in our way.

Man, however, wasn't meant to fly-neither with wings of Icarus nor within our
beloved machines that float on a cushion of air. Physiologically, we're designed
to locomote on two legs: to walk or to run. When we get behind the wheel of a
car, we may think we gain a bird's power of flight, but actually we are poor,
pathetic imitators of birds.

 

Thousands of people and millions of wild and domestic animals die every year in
this country because motorists lack the perceptual adaptations of birds.1
Motorists cannot avoid accidents because they are incapable of reacting quickly
enough when moving at high speed. Their flicker fusion frequency-the point at
which an animal sees an increasingly rapid flashing light as a continuous
beam-is too slow. Humans have a flicker fusion frequency of 60 Hz (60 cycles per
second); in domestic pigeons, flicker fusion frequency rises to 100 Hz. Birds of
prey, whose survival hinges on quickness, are thought to have an even higher
flicker fusion frequency than pigeons-consider, for example, the northern
goshawk, which lives in deep forests and earns its living by chasing down other
birds.

 

Without benefit of road markings, warning signs, traffic lights, and speed
limits, the goshawk zooms around its wild neighborhood in relative safety. As it
hotly pursues a ruffed grouse or wood duck, the goshawk may fly just above the
ground at 40 miles an hour, mirroring the unpredictable twists and turns of its
prey. Although the goshawk's wingspan approaches four feet, superb vision and
instant reflexes help it avoid collisions with countless branches.

 

Were a goshawk to watch a movie, its high flicker fusion frequency might cause
it to see jerky rather than smooth motion, similar to what we see in very old
movies, which run at a slower frame rate than modern ones.2 This visual
adaptation is thought to give birds greater resolving power while moving. A
goshawk flying at high speed can probably perceive an obstacle, and react to it
by veering away, in a fraction of the time it would take a motorist to avoid an
accident. If the goshawk were subject to the inferior perceptual abilities of
humans, it would end up splattered against a tree trunk.3

 

A road-hugging Porsche may be more responsive than a Ford Focus. But when you're
going 40 and a deer steps right in front of your car, the great equalizer comes
into play. If the deer is only a few yards away, both cars will collide with it,
because neither driver can escape the physiological limitations of being human.

 

The power we feel when we get into a car or an SUV is illusory. When we become
motorists, we actually get weaker. We leave our natural bipedal realm for an
airborne one in which we are out of control. Our self-absorption prevents us
from accepting our limitations, though every day we see the consequences in
untold deaths of humans and non-human animals.

Minimizing the ill effects of this hubris is simple enough.4 As Prince observed
in "Little Red Corvette": honey, you got to slow down. It's the price of being
human.

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