Mental fog causes 100 car pileup in Fresno

According to this morning's Los Angeles Times, "fog causes accident." It precedes this winter's coming series of "ice causes accident" headlines.

A massive highway pileup killed at least two people Saturday and shut a section of northbound California 99 in Fresno, clogging one of the state's major north-south routes.

All three northbound lanes were expected to be closed until at least midnight Saturday as authorities investigated what sparked the crashes, said California Highway Patrol Officer Scott Jobinger.

A total of 108 vehicles, including 18 big rigs, were involved in the collisions, which occurred about 7:45 a.m. over a two-mile stretch in dense fog, authorities said.

But the combination of fog and excessive speed by many vehicles was suspected to be the primary cause of the pileup, an official said.

As my wife, who is from California noted: "That's been happening every year since I was a child. Why don't they ever learn?"

I'm sure that fatigue, distraction, cell-phones, a new base speed of 85 mph, and financial stress were all contributing factors, but I'm also fairly sure, having watched this phenomenon for 40 years or so, that the largest "cause" of this type of accident is the passive, "what me worry?" kind of attitude that drivers bring to their driving today.

Between television's constant conditioning of us to be passive observers of anything going on at all, now boosted by huge screen sizes, and video-games conditioning that speed is fun and you can always just hit "reset" after you crash, people seem to have become walking or driving zombies that feel "cruise control" will drive their cars for them. Or the government. Or something, anything, except them themselves.

And, in the way of "unintended consequences", making safer and safer cars and safer and safer roads has led to the steady increase of basic driving speed. Around Detroit, this now seems to be somewhere around 87 miles per hour during rush hour, regardless of what the posted speed is.

So, kind of like they treat their health and body, they expect to abuse driving and then "take a pill" or rely on the air-bag to pull them out of whatever jam their cavalier attitude gets them into. Worrying about consequences is "someone else's job."

"There was no way I could know the fog hid a stopped car, so I did nothing!" seems to be the attitude. Once upon a time, that would have read "There was no way I could be sure the fog did not hide a stopped car, so I slowed down to about 5 miles per hour until I got through it.... as I'm sure everyone else would do too."

The same thing may be rampant at corporate or even national levels, where people rush into something they can't see through, and then are shocked that some problem was waiting for them there. This seems to have become the norm.

Regardless, the tipping point has been reached, critical mass achieved, and now this has become entangled with itself as a social "system" problem that individual action alone cannot fix.

In fact, to try to drive "60" in a "55 zone" is now unsafe due to risks of massive rear-end collisions from zoned-out drivers going 85, or the huge stream of cars dividing around your car and trying to merge back into the lane from both sides, now that passing on the right is normal.

(Once upon a time, young people, passing on the right side in the USA was not only discouraged, it was illegal and considered unsafe. It is still unsafe, but doesn't seem to be illegal. In fact, it seems to be more common to be passed on the right than on the left for some reason.)

As a new young driver in Cleveland in rush hour traffic, I was pulled over by a police car for going only 35 in a 35 mph zone. The officer was perplexed when I asked if I was supposed to break the law, and he finally muttered "Just go the same speed everyone else does!" as he left without giving me a ticket.

So, we have here another perfect example of a behavior situation where we can't change the behavior of "just one person" while leaving the rest of the surrounding people untouched.

Once you understand this pattern, you can see these problems are everywhere around us. We need to learn how to deal with them better.

And in a very real sense, "fog" didn't cause the accident. Fog was just the local trigger that revealed the system problem we have with how each other behaves. If we made fog somehow go away with huge fans or heaters or something, there would still be "ice causes accident" and "slippery road following rain" causes accident and "blind corner" causes accident, etc.

We can try to tackle each of those as a separate problem, or we can try to go back upstream and
figure out what structural system thing is happening here in all of them that we need to figure out how to fix instead.

We get way more "bang per buck" if we don't stop at the first "cause" we find, but keep going upstream until we find and fix the "root-cause problem", and don't spend time and money trying to solve each of the symptoms separately.

The second mental error that goes on here is belief that the "solution" is located "near" the problem. In some senses it is true to say "What could I do? There I was going 85 in the fog and this stopped car suddenly showed up and I had no time to brake!" In a larger sense, however, this is the whole point of learning and civilization that we run into such problems and realize they can't be fixed at the time they become visible, but have to be fixed way before that point.

What we can do is take action to prevent ever finding ourselves in a situation that has no good "way out." That requires a sense of personal responsibility for preventive and proactive actions that maybe no one can legally hold us to. We have to hold ourselves to a higher standard of conduct than the law can enforce.

In fact, following Toyota's "Five Whys", we can go further upstream and ask why it is that we, as a society, can't get our heads together, have a meeting, figure out what's going on, figure out what to do about it, and just do it.

We keep on looking for technical solutions so perfect that no one will need to "be good."

We won't find one. We need to start thinking more about the "being good" problem. It has a lot of similarity to the driving-safely problem -- if just one person does it, it doesn't work very well. We need to all decide, somehow, that we're all going to do it at the same time.

Those are the cultural shifts that are so important now, for letting go of our old behaviors that don't work anymore and moving, together, to new ones that do work.

Or, every year, in bigger and bigger ways, people will be saying "They keep doing that! Why don't they ever learn?" And that is a good place to start the investigation, instead of ending it. Why, exactly, are we having so much trouble learning and adapting.

Our corporations need to do a lot of learning and adapting to adjust to the new world, where there is actual competition and at least one other country is ahead of us in almost everything.

We can blame students for not learning, or teachers and schools for not teaching, but this is a larger cultural problem we all need to be working on together, or it can't be fixed.

If "patriotism" consists entirely of blaming other people for things that are wrong, and has no sense of civic responsibility to share in doing the heavy lifting ("someone else's job"), it won't make for a very successful company or country, once it starts bogging down in the the structural system problems that level of indifference or apathy creates that can't be fixed by just a few people doing all the work.

In some sense, then, this traces back upstream to the "not my problem" and "not my job" attitudes, and figuring out where those came into play and what to do about it. Collective cynicism, depression, and apathy are a pretty sure recipe for continuing decline that no technological system will fix.

Because, if we look at the economic equivalents of the 100 car pileups going on all around us, and at uncontrolled global climate change, this is rapidly becoming "our problem".

Related post: Ground causes accidents, claim pilots!

(California tule fog photo by by emdot
auto accident by by wander.lust )