Traffic (32 page)

One key to understanding traffic culture is that laws themselves can explain only so much. As important, if not more so, are the cultural norms, or the accepted behavior of a place. Indeed, laws are often just norms that have been codified. Take the example of the laws that say that in the United States, one must drive on the right side of the road, while in the United Kingdom, one must drive on the left side of the road. These emerged not from careful scientific study or lengthy legislative debate about the relative safety of each approach but from cultural norms that existed long before the car.

As the historian Peter Kincaid describes it, the reason why you drive on the right or left today has to do with two things. The first is that most people are right-handed. The second is that different countries were using different forms of transportation at the time that formalized rules of the road began to emerge. The way in which the first consideration interacted with the second consideration explains how we drive today. Thus a samurai in Japan, who kept his scabbard on his left side and would draw with his right arm, wanted to be on the left as he passed potential enemies on the road. So Japan today drives on the left. In England, horse-drawn carts were generally piloted by drivers mounted in the seat. The mostly right-handed drivers would “naturally” sit to the right, holding the reins in the left hand and the whip in the right. The driver could better judge oncoming traffic by traveling on the left. So England drives on the left. But in many other countries, including the United States, a driver often walked along the left side of his horse team or rode the left horse in a team (the left-rear horse if there were more than two), so that he could use his right arm for better control. This meant it was better to stay to the right, so he could judge oncoming traffic and talk to other drivers. The result is that many countries today drive on the right.

Even when laws are ostensibly the same, norms help explain why traffic can feel so different in different places. Driving on the Italian
autostrada
for the first time, for example, can be a shock to the uninitiated. Left-lane driving is reserved for passing, and for many drivers in the left lane, their entire trip is one epic overtaking, a process known in Italy as
il sorpasso,
a phrase freighted with additional meanings in social mobility. Get in the way of someone in the midst of a
sorpasso
and they will soon drive so close that you can feel, on the back of your neck, the heat of their headlights, which they’re flashing furiously. This is less a matter of aggressiveness than incredulousness at your violation of the standard.

“The law in most European countries is to drive as far to the right as is practical,” explained Per Garder, a Swedish professor of traffic engineering who now teaches at the University of Maine. “But in America that’s just on paper—the person who comes from behind almost always yields to the person in front, while in Italy it’s the person behind. You are supposed to move away and let them pass. As an American driver it is difficult to remember, especially if you’re going above the speed limit yourself—why shouldn’t you be allowed to be in the passing lane?” In the United States, a rather hazy norm (and a confusing array of laws) says that the left lane is reserved for the fastest traffic, but this is not as rigidly ingrained as it is in Italy. In fact, in the United States one is likely to see the occasional reaction (passive-aggressive braking, refusal to move, etc.) to Italian-style tailgating. Americans, perhaps out of some sense that equality or fairness or individual rights have been violated, seem to take these acts more personally. In Italy, which has a historically weak central government and overall civic culture, the citizenry relies less on the state for articulating concepts like fairness and equality. This, at least, was the theory presented to me in Rome by Giuseppe Cesaro, an official with the Automobile Club d’Italia. “In American movies, they always say, ‘I pay taxes. I have my rights.’ In Italy no one’s going to say this. You pay taxes? Then you are a fool.”

Norms may be cultural, but traffic can also create its own culture. Consider the case of jaywalking in New York City and Copenhagen. In both places, jaywalking, or crossing against the light, is technically prohibited. In both places, people have been ticketed for doing it. But the visitor to either city today will witness a shocking study in contrast. In New York City, where the term
jaywalking
was popularized, originally referring to those hapless bumpkins, or country “jays,” who came to the city with little notion of how to perambulate properly in big-city traffic,
waiting
for the signal is now the sign of a novice from the sticks. By contrast, the average Copenhagen resident seems to have a biological aversion to crossing against the light. Early on a freezing Sunday morning in January, not a car in sight, and they’ll refuse to jaywalk—this in a city with the largest anarchist commune in the world! They’ll stop, draw in a breath, perhaps tilt their head a bit skyward to catch a snowflake. They’ll gaze at shop windows, or look lost in thought. Then the signal will change, and they’ll move on, almost reluctantly.

It is tempting to chalk up the differences purely to culture. In New York City, a melting pot of clashing traditions and a hotbed of ruthless and obnoxious individualism, jaywalking is a way to distinguish yourself from the crowd and get ahead, a test of urban moxie. “Pedestrians look at cars, not lights,” Michael King, a traffic engineer in New York City, told me. Jaywalking also helps relieve overcrowded clusters at intersections. In Copenhagen, which historically has had a more homogenous, consensus-seeking population, jaywalking is an act of bad taste, an unnecessary departure from the harmony that sustains communities. Waiting for the light to change, like waiting for spring, seems a test of the stoic and wintry Scandinavian soul. In the 1930s, the Danish-Norwegian novelist Aksel Sandemose famously described a set of “laws” (called the
Jantelagen
) inspired by the small Danish town in which he was raised. They all basically had the same theme: Do not think you are better than anyone else. The “Jante laws” are a still popular shorthand toward explaining the relative social cohesion and egalitarian nature of Scandinavian societies, and it’s not hard to imagine them applied to traffic. Jaywalking, like speeding or excessive lane changing (which one rarely sees on Danish roads), is just a form of ostentatious narcissism that disrupts communal village life.

When I offered these theories to the celebrated urban planner Jan Gehl as we sat in his office in Copenhagen, he brushed them aside and countered with a rival theory: “I think the whole philosophy of the city means you have good-quality sidewalks and frequent intersections. You know you only have to wait for a short while and then it gets green.” By contrast, his firm had recently completed a study of London. “We found it was completely complicated to get across any street. We found that only twenty-five percent of the people actually did what the traffic planners suggested to do,” he said. The more you make things difficult for pedestrians, Gehl argued, the more you downgrade their status in the traffic system, “the more they start to take the law into their own hands.” I thought back to New York City, where the lights on Fifth Avenue seem purposely timed so that walkers have to pause at every intersection. Was it New York’s traffic system, and not New Yorkers themselves, that made the city the jaywalking capital of the United States?

There is an iron law in traffic engineering: The longer pedestrians have to wait for a signal to cross, the more likely they are to cross against the signal. The jaywalking tipping point seems to be about thirty seconds (the same time, it turns out, after which cars waiting to make a left turn against traffic begin to accept shorter, more dangerous gaps). The idea that waiting time might be the real explanation behind jaywalking was brought home to me one afternoon in London as I looked at brightly colored computer maps of pedestrian crossings with Jake Desyllas, an urban planner who heads Intelligent Space. On certain streets in London, he pointed out, the proportion of people who crossed only during the “green man” would be 75 percent, but on a neighboring street, the number would be drastically lower. It was not that the culture of people waiting to cross the street changed as they walked one block, but rather that one street-crossing design paid more heed to pedestrians than the other. Not surprisingly, the places where it took pedestrians longer to get across had more informal crossings. At one of the worst spots in London, the crossing to the Angel tube station across the A1 Street in Islington, Desyllas found that pedestrians who make it to the center island can wait as long as sixty-two seconds for a “Walk” signal. The city is virtually compelling pedestrians to jaywalk.

As if traffic were not complicated enough, there is the additional problem that it regularly throws together people with different norms. Because each is convinced they are right—and traffic laws often disprove neither—they’re that much more primed to “go off” at the other’s perceived mis-deeds (e.g., late merging, left-lane tailgating). Traffic also tosses together those with local knowledge and lesser-educated outside users, the pros with the amateurs. Any time-starved city dweller who has been stuck walking behind a group of slow-moving tourists has come across this phenomenon; proposals have been made for pedestrian “express lanes” in New York’s Times Square or London’s Oxford Street for this reason. Or take the local driver trapped behind someone looking for an unfamiliar address. The banal boulevard that one driver has seen a million times and wants to hurry through will be a fascinating spectacle for another driver, worthy of slow appreciation. In Florida, two bumper stickers embody this struggle:
I BRAKE FOR BEACHES
and
SOME OF US AREN’T ON VACATION.

What’s striking is how quickly the local norms can be picked up. Years of driver training or habit can be washed away like dirt from a windshield. David Shinar, an expert in the psychology of traffic at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University, argues this point: “If you take an Israeli driver and transplant him to Savannah, Georgia, I guarantee that within two months he will be driving like the people there, like everyone around him. And if you transport someone from the American Midwest to Tel Aviv, within days he will be driving like an Israeli—because if he doesn’t, he’ll get nowhere.” And so, like the visitor to England who begins to appreciate lukewarm beer, astute drivers will echo local inflections like the “Pittsburgh left,” that act of driving practiced primarily in the Steel City (but also Beijing) in which the change of a traffic light to green is an “unofficial” signal for a left-turning driver to quickly bolt across the oncoming traffic. New arrivals to Los Angeles soon become versed in the “California roll,” a.k.a. the “sushi stop,” which involves never quite coming to a complete halt at a stop sign.

Traffic is like a language. It generally works best if everyone knows and obeys the rules of grammar, though slang can be brutally effective. If you’re absolutely unfamiliar with it, it will seem confusing, chaotic, and fast. Learn a few words, and patterns begin to emerge. Become more fluent, and suddenly it all begins to make sense. Rome presents an interesting example here. As I mentioned in the Prologue, Rome has been grappling with traffic problems since it became Rome. As Caesar tried to ban carts, so did Mussolini, the “Twentieth-Century Caesar,” try to regulate the city to his whims. Il Duce, as one story goes, grew so impatient with the chaos on the Via Corso that he attempted, in vain, to force pedestrians to walk in only one direction on each side of the street. Appropriately for a city whose history is steeped in mythology, the Roman driver has assumed an almost mythological status.

Roman driving is distinguished by space and pace. The narrowness of most streets, coupled with the quick acceleration of small, manually shifted cars, enhances the feeling of speed. Drivers focus on entering the smallest gaps possible. As Cesaro, the official with the Automobile Club d’Italia, explained one afternoon in his office on the Via Nazionale, Roman traffic behavior is “simply a need—there are so many cars on the tight road. We are always side by side. Sometimes we start talking to each other. The traffic lights change two or three times. Sometimes we become friends.” Stuck at those lights, the car driver will notice a steady stream of scooters slowly filtering to the front of the queue, like the grains in a snow globe settling on the bottom. “They should follow rules like cars,” said Paolo Borgogne, also of the ACI, of Rome’s legions of scooters, “but for some reason it is believed they don’t need to…. Traffic lights, for instance, they consider furniture on the corner of the road.” But things are changing: Whereas for years scooter drivers required no license, a
patentino,
or “small driver’s license,” is now mandatory.

As with Delhi, however, it’s not difficult to imagine that Roman traffic jams would be worse if scooters (which make up one-fifth of the traffic) always acted like cars. And the legendarily “crazy” Roman traffic might just be a matter of interpretation. Max Hall, a physics teacher in Massachusetts who often rides his collection of classic Vespas and Lambrettas in Rome, says that he finds it
safer
to ride in Rome than in Boston. Not only are American drivers unfamiliar with scooters, he maintains, but they resent being passed by them: “In Rome car and truck drivers ‘know’ they are expected
not
to make sudden moves in traffic for fear of surprising, and hurting, two-wheeler drivers. And two-wheeler drivers drive, by and large, expecting
not
to be cut off.” In this regard, Rome is safer than other Italian cities where fewer riders wear helmets and studies have shown that scooters are much more likely to have collisions with cars. Reaching for the language of physics, Hall says, “The poetic and beautiful result is that four-wheelers behave like fixed objects, by moving very little relative to each other, even at significant speeds, while two-wheeler traffic moves ‘through’ the relatively static field of larger vehicles.”