Traffic (3 page)

And so we drive around with vague ideas of how things work. Every last one of us is a “traffic expert,” but our vision is skewed. We see things only through our own windshields. It is a repeated truism, borne out by insurance company surveys, for example, that most accidents happen very close to home. On first glance, it makes statistical sense: You’re likely to take more trips, and spend more time in the car, in your immediate surroundings. But could there be something deeper at work? Habits, psychologists suggest, provide a way to reduce the amount of mental energy that must be expended on routine tasks. Habits also form a mind-set, which gives us cues on how to behave in certain settings. So when we enter a familiar setting, like the streets around our house, habitual behavior takes over. On the one hand, this is efficient: It frees us from having to gather all sorts of new information, from getting sidetracked. Yet on the other hand, because we are expending less energy on analyzing what is around us, we may be letting our mental guard down. If in three years there has never been a car coming out of the Joneses’ driveway in the morning, what happens on the first day of the fourth year, when suddenly there is? Will we see it in time? Will we see it at all? Our feeling of safety and control is also a weakness. A study by a group of Israeli researchers found that drivers committed more traffic violations on familiar routes than on unfamiliar routes.

Surely you have had a moment when you were driving down the road and suddenly found yourself “awake at the wheel,” unable to remember the last few minutes. In a way, much of the time we spend in traffic is like that, a kind of gauzy dream state of automatic muscle movements and half-remembered images. Traffic is an in-between time in which we are more likely to think about where we are going than where we are at the moment. Time and space are skewed in traffic; our vision is fragmented and often unclear, and we take in and then almost immediately forget hundreds, perhaps thousands of images and impressions. Every minute we are surrounded by a different group of people, people we will share space with but never talk to, never meet.

Considering that many of us may spend more time in traffic than we do eating meals with our family, going on vacation, or having sex, it seems worth probing a bit deeper into the experience. As an American in the early twenty-first century, I live in the most auto-dependent, car-adapted, mileage-happy society in the history of the planet. We spend more on driving than on food or health care. As of the last census, there were more cars than citizens. In 1960, hardly any household had three vehicles, and most had only one. Now more own three than own one. Even as the size of the average North American family has fallen over the past several decades, the number of homes with multicar garages has almost doubled—one in five new homes has a three-car garage.

To pay for all that extra space, commute times have also been expanding. One of the fastest-growing categories in the last “commuting census” in the United States was that of “extreme commuters,” people who spend upward of two hours a day in traffic (moving or otherwise). Many of these are people pushed farther out by higher home prices, past the billboards that beckon “If you lived here, you’d be home by now,” in a phenomenon real estate agents call “drive till you qualify”—in other words, trading miles for mortgage. The average American, as of 2005, spent thirty-eight hours annually stuck in traffic. In 1969, nearly half of American children walked or biked to school; now just 16 percent do. From 1977 to 1995, the number of trips people made on foot dropped by nearly half. This has given rise to a joke: In America, a pedestrian is someone who has just parked their car.

Traffic has become a way of life. The expanding car cup holder, which became fully realized standard equipment only in the 1980s, is now the vital enabler of dashboard dining, a “food and beverage venue” hosting such products as Campbell’s Soup at Hand and Yoplait’s Go-Gurt. In 2001, there were 134 food products that featured the word
go
on the label or in ads; by 2004, there were 504. Accordingly, the number of what the industry calls “on-the-go eating occasions” in the United States and Europe combined is predicted to rise from 73.2 billion in 2003 to 84.4 billion in 2008. Fast-food restaurants now clock as much as 70 percent of their sales at drive-through windows. (Early in our romance with the car, we used to go to “drive-in” restaurants, but those now seem relics of a gentler, slower age.) An estimated 22 percent of all restaurant meals are ordered through a car window in America, but other places, like Northern Ireland—where one in eight people are said to eat in the car at least once per week—are getting into the act too. McDonald’s has added a second lane to hundreds of its restaurants in the United States in order to speed traffic, and at its new drive-throughs in China, dubbed De Lai Su (for “Come and Get It Fast”), the company is pitching retooled regional offerings like “rice burgers” to its burgeoning drive-through customers. Starbucks, which initially resisted the drive-through for its fast-food connotations, now has drive-throughs at more than half of its new company-owned stores. The “third place” that Starbucks espouses, the place for community and leisure between home and work, is, arguably, the car.

Traffic has even shaped the food we eat. “One-handed convenience” is the mantra, with forkless foods like Taco Bell’s hexagonal Crunchwrap Supreme, designed “to handle well in the car.” I spent an afternoon in Los Angeles with an advertising executive who had, at the behest of that same restaurant chain, conducted a test, in actual traffic, of which foods were easiest to eat while driving. The main barometer of success or failure was the number of napkins used. But if food does spill, one can simply reach for Tide to Go, a penlike device for “portable stain removal,” which can be purchased at one of the more than twelve hundred (and growing) CVS drugstores that feature a drive-through window. The “audiobook,” virtually unheard of before the 1980s, represents a business worth $871 million a year, and wouldn’t you know it, “traffic congestion” gets prominent mention in sales reports from the Audio Publishers Association. Car commuting is so entrenched in daily life that National Public Radio refers to its most popular segments as “driveway moments,” meaning the listener is so riveted to a story they cannot leave their car. In Los Angeles, some synagogues have been forced to change the time of their evening services from eight p.m. to six p.m. in order to capture commuters on their way home, as going home and then returning to services is too much to bear in L.A. traffic. So much time is spent in cars in the United States, studies show, that drivers (particularly men) have higher rates of skin cancer on their left sides—look for the opposite effect in countries where people drive on the left.

Americans have long been fabled for their love of mobility. The nineteenth-century French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of millions “marching at once toward the same horizon,” a phrase that springs to mind today when I’m flying over any large city and look at the parallel strings of red and white lights, draped like glittering necklaces over the landscape.

But this is not just a book about North America. While the United States may still have the world’s most thoroughgoing car culture, traffic has become a universal condition, inflected with regional accents. In Moscow, the old images of Russians waiting in line have been replaced by images of idling cars stuck in heavy congestion. Ireland has seen its car-ownership rates double since 1990. The once tranquil Tibetan capital of Lhasa now has jams and underground parking garages. In Caracas, Venezuela, traffic is currently ranked “among the world’s worst,” thanks in part to an oil-fueled economic boom—and in part to cheap gas (as low as seven cents a gallon). In São Paulo, the wealthy shuttle between the city’s more than three hundred helipads rather than brave the legendary traffic. In Jakarta, desperate Indonesians work as “car jockeys,” hitchhikers of a sort who are paid to help drivers meet the passenger quota for the faster car-pool lanes.

Another traffic-related job has emerged outside Shanghai and other Chinese cities, according to Jian Shou Wang, the head of Kijiji (the eBay of China). There, one can find a new type of worker:
Zhiye dailu,
or professional road guides, who for a small fee will jump into one’s car and provide directions in the unfamiliar city—a human “nav system.” But with opportunity comes cost. In China, the number of people being killed on the road every year is now greater than the total number of vehicles the country was manufacturing annually as recently as 1970. By 2020, the World Health Organization predicts, road fatalities will be the world’s third-leading cause of death.

We are all traveling the same road, if each in our own peculiar way. I invite you to join me on that road as I try, over the din of passing cars, to hear what traffic has to say.

Why Does the Other Lane Always Seem Faster? How Traffic Messes with Our Heads

HORN BROKEN. WATCH FOR FINGER.

—bumper sticker

In
Motor Mania,
a 1950 Walt Disney short, the lovably dim dog Goofy stars as “Mr. Walker,” a model pedestrian (on two legs). He is a “good citizen,” courteous and honest, the sort who whistles back at birds and wouldn’t “step on an ant.” Once Mr. Walker gets behind the steering wheel of his car, however, a “strange phenomenon takes place.” His “whole personality changes.” He becomes “Mr. Wheeler,” a power-obsessed “uncontrollable monster” who races other cars at stop lights and views the road as his own personal property (but still “considers himself a good driver”). Then he steps out of his car, and, deprived of his “personal armor,” reverts to being Mr. Walker. Every time he gets back into his car, despite the fact that he knows “how the other fellow feels,” he is consumed by the personality of Mr. Wheeler.

What Disney was identifying, in his brilliantly simple way, was a commonplace but peculiar fact of life: We are how we move. Like Goofy, I, too, suffer from this multiple personality disorder. When I walk, which as a New Yorker I often do, I view cars as loud, polluting annoyances driven by out-of-town drunks distracted by their cell phones. When I drive, I find that pedestrians are suddenly the menace, whacked-out iPod drones blithely meandering across the street without looking. When I ride a bike, I get the worst of both worlds, buffeted by speeding cars whose drivers resent my superior health and fuel economy, and hounded by oblivious pedestrians who seem to think it’s safe to cross against the light if “only a bike” is coming but are then startled and indignant as I whisk past at twenty-five miles per hour.

I am guessing this sort of thing happens to you as well. Let us call it a “modal bias.” Some of this has to do with our skewed perceptual senses, as I will discuss in Chapter 3. Some of it has to do with territoriality, like when bicyclists and pedestrians sharing a path yell at each other or someone pushing a triplet-sized stroller turns into the pedestrian version of the SUV, commandeering the sidewalk through sheer size. But something deeper and more transformative happens when we move from people who walk to people who drive. The “personal armor” described by Disney is perhaps not so far-fetched. One study of pedestrian fatalities by French researchers showed that a significant number were associated with a “change of mode”—for example, moving from car to foot—as if, the authors speculated, drivers leaving their vehicles still felt a certain invulnerability.

Psychologists have struggled to understand the “deviant driver,” creating detailed personality profiles to understand who’s likely to fall prey to “road rage.” An early mantra, originally applied to what was called the “accident-prone driver,” has long held sway: “A man drives as he lives.” This is why car insurance premiums are tied not only to driving history but, more controversially, to credit scores; risky credit, the thinking goes, correlates with taking risks on the road. The statistical association between lower credit scores and higher insurance losses is just that, however; the reasons why how one lives might be linked to how one drives are less clear. And as inquiries into this question typically involve questionnaires, they’re open to various self-reported response biases. How would
you
answer this sample question: Are you a raving psychopath on wheels? (Please check “never,” “sometimes,” or “always.”) Generally, these inquiries come to what hardly seem earth-shattering conclusions: that “sensation-seeking,” “risk-seeking,” “novelty-seeking,” and “aggressive” individuals tend to drive in a riskier, more aggressive manner. You weren’t going to bet your paycheck on daredevil drivers being the risk-averse people who crave quiet normalcy and routine, were you?

Even using a phrase like “road rage” lends a clinical legitimacy to what might simply be termed bad or boorish behavior elsewhere. “Traffic tantrums” is a useful alternative, nicely underscoring the raw childishness of aggressive driving. The more interesting question is not whether some of us are more prone to act like homicidal maniacs once we get behind the wheel but why we
all
act differently. What is going on seems to have less to do with a change in personality than with a change in our entire being. In traffic, we struggle to stay human.

Think of language, perhaps the defining human characteristic. Being in a car renders us mostly mute. Instead of complex vocabularies and subtle shifts in facial expression, the language of traffic is reduced—necessarily, for reasons of safety and economy—to a range of basic signals, formal and informal, that convey only the simplest of meanings. Studies have shown that many of these signals, particularly informal ones, are often misunderstood, especially by novice drivers. To take one example, the Reverend David Rowe, who heads a congregation in the wealthy Connecticut suburb of Fairfield and, improbably, is a great fan of the neopunk band Green Day, told me he was once driving down the road when he spotted a car with a Green Day bumper sticker. He honked to show his solidarity. For his efforts he was rewarded with a finger.

Even formal signals are sometimes hazy: Is that person who keeps driving with their right turn signal on actually going to turn or have they forgotten it’s still blinking? Unfortunately, there’s no way to ask the driver what they mean. This may lead to a rhetorical outburst: “Are you going to turn or not?” But you can’t ask; nor would there be a way to get an answer back. Frustrated by our inability to talk, we gesture violently or honk—a noise the offending driver might misinterpret. At some point you may have been the recipient of an unsolicited honk, to which you immediately responded with defensive anger—
What?!
—only to learn that the honker was trying to convey to you that you left your gas cap open.
Thanks! Have a good one!

Traffic is riddled with such “asymmetries” in communication, as Jack Katz, a sociologist at the University of California in Los Angeles and the author of
How Emotions Work,
describes them. “You can see but you can’t be heard,” he told me. “In a very precise way, you’re made dumb. You can shout as much as you want but nobody’s going to hear you.”

Another way to think about this “asymmetry” is that while you can see a lot of other drivers making mistakes, you are less likely to see yourself doing so. (A former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, had a wonderful solution to this, hiring mimes to people the city’s crosswalks and silently mock drivers and pedestrians who violated traffic laws.) Drivers also spend much of their time in traffic looking at the rear ends of other cars, an activity culturally associated with subordination. It also tends to make the communication one-way: You’re looking at a bunch of drivers who cannot see you. “It’s like trying to talk to someone who’s walking in front of you, as opposed to someone who’s face-to-face with you,” Katz says. “We’re looking at everybody’s rear, and that’s not how human beings were set up to maximize their communicative possibility.”

This muteness, Katz argues, makes us mad. We are desperate to say something. In one study, in-car researchers pretended to be measuring the speed and distance perception of drivers. What they were really interested in was how their subjects would react to a honk from another driver. They made this happen by giving subjects instructions as they paused at a stop sign. They then had an accomplice pull up behind the stalled car and honk. More than three-quarters of the drivers reacted verbally, despite the fact they would not be heard by the honker.

When a driver is cut off by another driver, the gesture is read as rude, perhaps hostile. There is no way for the offending driver to indicate that it was anything but rude or hostile. Because of the fleeting nature of traffic, the act is not likely to be witnessed by anyone else. No one, save perhaps your passenger, will shake their heads in unison with you and say, “Can you believe he did that?” There are at least two possible responses. One is to speed ahead and cut the offending driver off in turn, to “teach them a lesson.” But there is no guarantee that the person receiving the lesson is aware of what they have done—and so your lesson simply becomes a provocation—or that they will accept your position as the “teacher” in any case. And even if your lesson is successful, you’re not likely to receive any future benefit. Another response is to use an “informal” traffic signal, like the middle finger (or, as is gaining currency in Australia, the pinkie, after an ad campaign by the Road and Traffic Authority to suggest that the person speeding or otherwise driving aggressively is overcompensating for deficient male anatomy). This gains power, Katz says, if the person you give the finger to visually registers that you’re giving him the finger. But what if that person merely gives the finger back?

Finally, it is often impossible to even send a message to the offending driver in the first place. Yet still we get visibly mad, to an audience of no one. Katz argues that we are engaging in a kind of theatrical storytelling, inside of our cars, angrily “constructing moral dramas” in which we are the wronged victims—and the “avenging hero”—in some traffic epic of larger importance. It is not enough to think bad thoughts about the other driver; we get angry, in essence, to watch ourselves get angry. “The angry driver,” Katz argues, “becomes a magician taken in by his or her own magic.” Sometimes, says Katz, as part of this “moral drama,” and in an effort to create a “new meaning” for the encounter, we will try to find out something after the fact about the driver who wronged us (perhaps speeding up to see them), meanwhile running down a mental list of potential villains (e.g., women, men, teenagers, senior citizens, truck drivers, Democrats, Republicans, “idiots on cell phones,” or, if all else fails, simply “idiots”) before finding a suitable resolution to the drama.

This seems an on-road version of what psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error,” a commonly observed way in which we ascribe the actions of others to who they are; in what is known as the “actor-observer effect,” meanwhile, we attribute our own actions to how we were forced to act in specific situations. Chances are you have never looked at
yourself
in the rearview mirror and thought, “Stupid #$%&! driver.” Psychologists theorize that the actor-observer effect may stem from one’s desire to feel more in control of a complex situation, like driving in traffic. It also just might be easier to chastise a “stupid driver” for cutting you off than to fully analyze the circumstances that caused this event to occur.

On a larger scale, it might also help explain, more than actual national or civic chauvinism, why drivers the world around have their own favorite traffic targets: “The Albanians are terrible drivers,” say the Greeks. “The Dutch are the worst drivers,” say the Germans. It’s best not to get New Yorkers started about New Jersey drivers. We even seem to make the fundamental attribution error in the way we travel. When bicyclists violate a traffic law, research has showed it is because, in the eyes of drivers, they are reckless anarchists; drivers, meanwhile, are more likely to view the violation of a traffic law by another driver as somehow being required by the circumstances.

At least some of this anger seems intended to maintain our sense of identity, another human trait that is lost in traffic. The driver is reduced to a brand of vehicle (a rough stereotype at best) and an anonymous license-plate number. We look for glimpses of meaning in this sea of anonymity: Think of the curious joy you get when you see a car that matches your own, or a license plate from your home state or country when you are in another. (Studies with experimental games have shown that people will act more kindly toward someone they have been told shares their birth date.) Some drivers, especially in the United States, try in vain to establish their identities with personalized vanity plates, but this raises the question of whether you really want your life summed up in seven letters—let alone why you want to tell a bunch of people you don’t know who you are! Americans seem similarly (and particularly) predisposed to putting cheap bumper stickers on their expensive cars—announcing the academic wizardry of their progeny, jocularly advising that their “other car is a Porsche,” or giving subtle hints (“MV”) of their exclusive vacation haunts. One never sees a German blazing down the autobahn with a
PROUD TO BE GERMAN
sticker.

Trying to assert one’s identity in traffic is always going to be problematic, in any case, because the driver yields his or her identity to the cars. We become, Katz says, cyborgs. Our vehicle becomes our self. “You project your body way out in front of a vehicle,” says Katz. “When somebody’s changed lanes a hundred yards ahead, you instantly feel you’ve been cut off. They haven’t touched you physically, they haven’t touched your car physically, but in order to adjust the wheel and acceleration and braking, you have projected yourself.” We say, “Get out of my way,” not “Get out of my and my car’s way.”