“A lot of driving, on the highway in particular, is all designed around calming your brain so that you will go that fast, because humans are not evolved to go that fast. … Most people estimate when surveyed that a dash in a dividing line of a highway is two feet long, when in fact they're 10 to 15 feet long. And it is all there to calm your brain at going at high speeds so that you can go very fast and have it not freak you out.”
Conversations with Tyler · Ideas & Essays · October 2026
Context
Tyler Cowen asked whether suggested speed limits on ramps should just tell drivers the truth. Mars answered that highway design is built to lull drivers into going fast, so the road sometimes has to jolt them back out of that state.
Transcript
…in me figuring that out and doing the math as I become a better driver or more confident driver or know the roads better that serves some purpose. It's just that that purpose, like the sort of intention and the effect are kind of hard to calculate. So would it be better to tell people the truth?
Another rule is to double the number and subtract 10. Yeah, that's more ambitious than your
…and driving in general, like on the highway in particular, is all designed around calming your brain so that you will go that fast because humans are not evolved to go that fast. So like if you were to get out on a highway and stand next to a sign, most people marvel at the size of a highway sign. Like they have no idea that it's really that big. And part of that and the dashes in between lanes, most people estimate when surveyed that a dash in a dividing line of a highway is two feet long, when in fact they're 10 to 15 feet long. And it is all there to calm your brain at going at high speeds so that you can go very fast and have it not freak you out. So when you're going a transition of like tricking people's brains into going very fast so that a highway functions, you have to do things that sort of like shock people out of their hypnotic state to get them into different driving mode. And so an artificially low speed limit or suggested limit, it makes some sense to do it that way. But also like, you know, like as people begin to game it and…
You have a very famous TED Talk on city flags and what makes for a good city flag. And you've propagated the term vexillology, the study of flags. Why should there be no lettering on flags? City flags, that is.
Because a flag is meant to be flying on a pole. And so it should be effectively work from backwards and forwards. So it's just because it has a backside that you can see. And so it's not good.
What about the other perspective that outsiders never see flags? Like I've been, I think, to the 50 largest American cities often repeatedly. There's not one city flag I could identify from any one of them until I saw your talk.
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