Logical and Critical Thinking

Speeding and the time-saving bias

A lot of effort goes into convincing motorists not to speed,
especially around holiday periods. Mainly we try to show that
speeding can have bad consequences, from the cost and
inconvenience of getting ticketed all they way through to injury and
death.

But there is another reason not to speed that doesn’t get much
coverage, and that should convince everyone that once they are
travelling above rather low speeds, accelerating even more doesn’t
make much sense.

How can that be? It turns out that the assumption that driving faster will
get us where we are going quicker is flawed, and not just because of the
standard concerns about increased risks of an accident.

A 10km trip at 10kph would take an hour. The same trip at 20kph would
take half an hour, a quite dramatic time saving. If we are interested in
saving time – in getting where we are going more quickly – perhaps it
makes sense to travel at 20kph rather than 10kph if we can.

Suppose we speed up to 30kph? Now our 10km trip will take 20 minutes.
Travelling at 30kph means we get where are going 10 minutes earlier
than travelling at 20kph: perhaps that will seem worthwhile too.

Well, suppose we accelerate to a heady 40kph? Now our trip takes 15

minutes. Traveling at 40kph rather than 30kph means we get to where
we are going 5 minutes earlier.

Notice what is happening here. Speeding up does save us time, but less
and less as we increase from higher starting speeds. Accelerating from
10kph to 20kph saves 30 minutes on a 10km journey, but accelerating
from 20kph to 30kph – the same speed increase – saves only 10
minutes, and accelerating from 30kph to 40kph saves only 5 minutes.

The trend is constant, and by the time we get to the speeds we are likely
to be interested in, the time savings are tiny. Travelling 10km at 90kph
rather than 80kph saves us only 54 seconds, and at 100kph rather than
90kph only 42 seconds!
Of course the longer the journey the more time we save. The 10km
figures are ten times higher over 100km, but still the time saved by
travelling at 100kph rather than 90kph over 100km is a paltry 7 minutes.

It turns out that the common, almost universal, assumption that we will
get to where we are going more quickly if we travel at higher speeds is, if
not false, at least much less significant than we might have imagined.

Once set out this seems obvious. Why do we persist in thinking travelling
at higher speeds will make a significant difference to journey times? The
tendency to overestimate the time saved by doing tasks more quickly is
called the ‘time-saving bias’, and it is one of a cluster of common
reasoning errors all humans are inclined to make. Even people who are
perfectly ok with basic maths tend to judge things like probability and
how much time we save if we travel faster on the basis of ‘first
impressions’ rather than calculation.

We tend to judge the likelihood of something happening, for instance, by

seeing how readily an example of that thing comes to mind, by how
‘available’ it is to us. Availability may be a pretty good guide to
probability: more common things should come to mind more readily than
rare things.

But things readily come to mind not only because they are common but
because they are striking, because we have just seen an example on
the news, or because we have some particular reason to care about that
thing. People think plane crashes and terrible sporting accidents are
more likely following a high profile example, and parents overestimate
the probability of side-effects from vaccinations because they have an
understandable concern about them: they come to mind more readily
than they should given their actual probability.

There is often a good reason for using these ‘heuristics,’ as they’re

called. They are quick and fairly reliable and – assuming many of them
have their roots in the early evolution of our cognitive capacities – they
probably worked in the environments in which we evolved. Being able to
readily bring to mind food when we contemplated an environment might
have been a pretty good way of estimating the probability of finding it
there, and if the availability heuristic occasionally led us to overestimate
the likelihood of running into a sabre-tooth tiger, that may have been no
bad thing.

But it is clear that these ‘quick and dirty’ reasoning strategies can also
lead us astray. Obviously it’s good to avoid these common reasoning
errors. It helps us develop true beliefs and reject false ones. But it also
has practical benefits. In the driving case, it should lead us to see that
driving faster delivers almost no benefits. Once we see that we should
feel less frustration when meeting slower drivers and reduce the risks of
accidents or encounters with traffic patrols.

© Tim Dare, University of Auckland