Message sent: It's a stimulus-starved work environment
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WE MAY be way off, blaming the distractions of texting for the recent Green Line crashes ("Trolley safety system put off," Page A1, May 25). If, as MBTA General Manager Daniel Grabauskas says, "800 bus operators drive safely each day without the aid of an automatic stop system," the far fewer distractions of operating an underground trolley may be the culprit.
In his book "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)," which your editorial page recommended in its May 25 editorial "The books of summer," Tom Vanderbilt writes that when people get behind the wheel, "We are navigating through a legal system, . . . we are processing a bewildering amount of information, we are constantly making predictions and calculations and on-the-fly judgments of risk and reward."
Bus drivers constantly have to process this kind of information: traffic flow, pedestrians, traffic lights, curbs, lanes, crosswalks, passengers, emergency vehicles, sunlight, and shadow. Underground Green Line drivers encounter none of these stimuli; they just sit there and wait for signal lights to turn color. It's no wonder they're tempted to turn on their cellphones. They don't have enough to do, or enough to pay attention to. It's a boring, stimulus-starved work environment, a kind of solitary confinement.
Now, what to do about it?
Nora Nevin
Tisbury 
