Drivers yield less to people walking if they’re in expensive cars, or maybe to people of color

Drivers of more expensive cars are less likely to stop for people on foot trying to cross the street, a new study found. They also yielded less to men and African Americans, though that difference didn’t reach statistical significance.

The study had a white woman, black woman, white man, and black man all try to cross two streets in exactly the same way at a painted crosswalk in the middle of a block in Las Vegas. Each street was two lanes each way with a center turn lane; the people stepped one foot off the curb when the oncoming car reached a predetermined spot. The study team recorded the crossings and analyzed the driver behavior and estimated the price of their car based on the model and year.

They found that for each $1,000 more of value of the car, drivers were 3% less likely to yield. The study team hypothesized (but certainly didn’t actually test) that this could be because owners of more expensive cars are less familiar with the experience of being a pedestrian in Las Vegas, since walking in that city is more common among people of lower incomes. (However, they did the test near an elementary school in hopes of getting drivers who are more attuned to people walking, and both streets were in lower-income areas.)

Or, they say, the difference could just back up general research from Paul K Piff at UC Berkeley that “higher social-class standing was positively associated with increased feelings of entitlement and narcissism.”

The drivers also yielded more often to the women (31% of the time) versus men (24%), and to the white pedestrians (31%) versus black (25%). However, the paper notes there was a hiccup with the video recording due to the hot Las Vegas weather, and some did not get recorded, including all of the crossings by the black man on the first of the two streets; therefore, they can’t say this difference reached statistical significance.

Sometimes there were multiple cars in a row, and the researchers discovered that “if the first car did not yield, neither did the following cars or vice versa (if the first car yielded so did subsequent cars).” A 2015 study by Texas A&M’s Tara Goddard, cited in this paper, tested multiple cars yielding and found that first cars yielded at the same rate no matter what the gender or race of the pedestrian, but “black pedestrians were twice as likely to have to wait for subsequent cars to yield as the white pedestrian.”

The study, by Courtney Coughenour, James Abelar, Jennifer Pharr, Lung-Chang Chien, and Ashok Singh at the UNLV School of Public Health, was funded by a grant from NIH.