Behavioral Expectations - Consider 1

So, let's consider an example. Imagine the danger posed by making a parking lot that had a confusing driveway, or it was unclear where to park. So you can imagine, maybe I've got a parking lot that has a driveway very close to, say, another intersection. So I have a situation where somebody driving down here is driving along and they think that they've gotten to this corner, but in fact, they turn in there, because this distance is too close, it's just not what people expect.

They don't think that there's gonna be a driveway right near an intersection like that. And so, that lack of expectation, that lack of it reading in that typical, appropriate way that they're gonna realize, "Oh, wait, "this is a parking lot," and they're gonna be stopped right there as they realize they're in the wrong spot. And what're they gonna do? Well, they're gonna stop and they're gonna back out back into the street again.

It's incredibly dangerous. So, that kind of expectation where, suddenly, it's not the way that people thought it was going to be, they don't know what to do, and they start to have panic, and they do things that are not smart and potentially even dangerous. Okay, so, in this situation, we clearly have a parking lot that looks kind of like that. You know, what if this same parking lot looked something like that?

There's no lines, this looks too wide. Will you start to get cars parking here, but then maybe other cars parking here? You know, you start getting into a situation where the distances are wrong, it doesn't feel right, it doesn't have the expectation of how people want to park. The reason parking lots look the same all the time is because they're dangerous if they don't look the same. If you don't know where to go, if you don't just automatically think, "Okay, I'm gonna pull in, there's some spaces.

"I'm gonna pull in just the way I always "pull into a parking space." If you start getting a situation where you're confused, people will be stopped in unusual spots trying to figure it out, they might park in places where it's dangerous for how somebody else is gonna be backing in or backing out. You have difficulty with people getting in and out. You're talking about this idea that certain things just are done a certain way, and once that's sort of established in the kind of societal brain space, the expectation is there that that's how it's going to work, and to counter that, you have to really want to go against it.

Otherwise, you're potentially, in this particular example with the parking, you're creating dangerous elements. In other situations, it may not be about danger, just about confusion. But in these situations, it can actually be really quite a danger. The other situation that kind of goes with this is the idea of, imagine you come in to a parking lot, and there's an entry, but then as soon as you come in, there's a block and the spaces are there, and then maybe over here.

So, you know, that's not too bad, right? You have this ability to have a drive through parking, it's got a bunch of advantages.

That's not a bad parking lot. But one of the disadvantages is that, by having a situation where this car, as they're pulling in, first pulls in, they're not expecting to have to stop right away, and there's something discombobulating about that. I come up and it's like, "Oh, which way do I go? "Do I go that way or do I go that way?" And that question makes them stop when there's a car behind them that doesn't realize they're gonna stop.

So, in general, I'm always gonna try to keep that traffic flow moving and then coming back and out. So, again, you're looking for things to be the way that people expect them to be. Now, there's a lot of flexibility within that. It doesn't have to be that every parking lot looks exactly the same. There's lots of different tricks to it, and there's lots of ways that it'll adapt to the context, and it'll fit right in, in certain ways, through materials, through landscaping, through screening materials, all of those things.

So there's lots of ways for it to be adapted, but you don't want to be creating something that the sheer fact of the way that you've created it is actually creating a dangerous place.

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