Authors: Tom Vanderbilt
In ancient Rome, the chariot traffic grew so intense that Caesar, the self-proclaimed
curator viarum,
or “director of the great roads,” declared a daytime ban on carts and chariots, “except to transport construction materials for the temples of the gods or for other great public works or to take away demolition materials.” Carts could enter the city only after three p.m. And yet, as one so often finds in the world of traffic, there is very rarely an action without an equal and opposite reaction. By making it easier for the average Roman to move around during the day, Caesar made it harder for them to sleep at night. The poet Juvenal, sounding like a second-century version of a contemporary Roman complaining about scooter traffic, lamented, “Only if one has a lot of money can one sleep in Rome. The source of the problem lies in the carts passing through the bottlenecks of the curved streets, and the flocks that stop and make so much noise they would prevent…even a devil-fish from sleeping.”
By the time we get to medieval England, we can see that traffic was still a problem in search of a solution. Towns tried to limit, through laws or tolls, where and when traveling merchants could sell things. Magistrates restricted the entry of “shod carts” into towns because they damaged bridges and roads. In one town, horses were forbidden to drink at the river, as children were often found playing nearby. Speeding became a social problem. The
Liber Albus,
the rule book of fifteenth-century London, forbade a driver to “drive his cart more quickly when it is unloaded than when it is loaded” (if he did, he would be looking at a forty-pence speeding ticket or, more drastically, “having his body committed to prison at the will of the Mayor”).
In 1720, traffic fatalities from “furiously driven” carts and coaches were named the leading cause of death in London (eclipsing fire and “immoderate quaffing”), while commentators decried the “Controversies, Quarreling, and Disturbances” caused by drivers “contesting for the way.” Meanwhile, in the New York of 1867, horses were killing an average of four pedestrians a week (a bit higher than today’s rate of traffic fatalities, although there were far fewer people and far fewer vehicles). Spooked runaways trampled pedestrians underfoot, “reckless drivers” paid little heed to the 5-mile-an-hour speed limit, and there was little concept of right-of-way. “As matters now stand,” the
New York Times
wrote in 1888, “drivers seem to be legally justified in ignoring crossings and causing [pedestrians] to run or dodge over vehicles when they wish to pass over.”
The larger the cities grew, and the more ways people devised to get around those cities, the more complicated traffic became, and the more difficult to manage. Take, for instance, the scene that occurred on lower Broadway in New York City on the afternoon of December 23, 1879, an “extraordinary and unprecedented blockade of traffic” that lasted five hours. Who was in this “nondescript jam,” as the
New York Times
called it? The list is staggering: “single and double teams, double teams with a tandem leader, and four-horse teams; hacks, coupes, trucks, drays, butcher carts, passenger stages, express wagons, grocers’ and hucksters’ wagons, two-wheeled ‘dog carts,’ furniture carts and piano trucks, and jewelers’ and fancy goods dealers’ light delivery wagons, and two or three advertising vans, with flimsy transparent canvas sides to show illumination at night.”
Just when it seemed as if things could not get more complicated on the road, along came a novel and controversial machine, the first new form of personal transportation since the days of Caesar’s Rome, a new-fangled contrivance that upset the fragile balance of traffic. I am talking, of course, about the bicycle.
After a couple of false starts, the “bicycle boom” of the late nineteenth century created a social furor. Bicycles were too fast. They threatened their riders with strange ailments, like
kyphosis bicyclistarum,
or “bicycle stoop.” They spooked horses and caused accidents. Fisticuffs were exchanged between cyclists and noncyclists. Cities tried to ban them outright. They were restricted from streets because they were not coaches, and restricted from sidewalks because they were not pedestrians. The bicycle activists of today who argue that cars should not be allowed in places like Brooklyn’s Prospect Park were preceded, over a hundred years ago, by “wheelmen” fighting for the right for bicycles to be allowed in that same park. New bicycle etiquette questions were broached: Should men yield the right-of-way to women?
There is a pattern here, from the chariot in Pompeii to the Segway in Seattle. Once humans decided to do anything but walk, once they became “traffic,” they had to learn a whole new way of getting around and getting along. What is the road for? Who is the road for? How will these streams of traffic flow together? Before the dust kicked up by the bicycles had even settled, the whole order was toppled again by the automobile, which was beginning to careen down those same “good roads” the cyclists themselves, in a bit of tragic irony, had helped create.
When driving began, it was like a juggernaut, and we have rarely had time to pause and reflect upon the new kind of life that was being made. When the first electric car debuted in mid-nineteenth-century England, the speed limit was hastily set at 4 miles per hour—the speed at which a man carrying a red flag could run ahead of a car entering a town, an event that was still a quite rare occurrence. That man with the red flag racing the car was like a metaphor of traffic itself. It was probably also the last time the automobile existed at anything like human speed or scale. The car was soon to create a world of its own, a world in which humans, separated from everything outside the car but still somehow connected, would move at speeds beyond anything for which their evolutionary history had prepared them.
At first, cars simply joined the chaotic traffic already in the street, where the only real rule of the road in most North American cities was “keep to the right.” In 1902, William Phelps Eno, a “well-known yachtsman, clubman, and Yale graduate” who would become known as “the first traffic technician of the whole world,” set about untangling the strangling miasma that was New York City’s streets. (Deaths by automobile were already, according to the
New York Times,
“every-day occurrences” with little “news value” unless they involved persons of “exceptional social or business prominence.”) Eno was every bit the WASP patrician as social reformer, a familiar character then in New York. He thundered at “the stupidity of drivers, pedestrians and police” and bluntly wielded his favorite maxim: “It is easy to control a trained army but next to impossible to regulate a mob.” Eno proposed a series of “radical ordinances” to rein in New York’s traffic, a plan that seems hopelessly quaint now, with its instructions on the “right way to turn a corner” and its audacious demands that cars go in only
one
direction around Columbus Circle. But Eno, who became a global celebrity of sorts, boating off to Paris and São Paulo to solve local traffic problems, was as much a social engineer as a traffic engineer, teaching vast numbers of people to act and communicate in new ways, often against their will.
In the beginning this language was more Tower of Babel than Esperanto. In one town, the blast of a policeman’s whistle might mean stop, in another go. A red light indicated one thing here, another thing there. The first stop signs were yellow, even though many people thought they should be red. As one traffic engineer summed up early-twentieth-century traffic control, “there was a great wave of arrow lenses, purple lenses, lenses with crosses, etc., all giving special instructions to the motorist, who, as a rule, hadn’t the faintest idea of what these special indications meant.” The systems we take for granted today required years of evolution, and were often steeped in controversy. The first traffic lights had two indications, one for stop and one for go. Then someone proposed a third light, today’s “amber phase,” so cars would have time to clear the intersection. Some engineers resisted this, on the grounds that vehicles were “amber rushing,” or trying to beat the light, which actually made things more dangerous. Others wanted the yellow light shown before the signal was changing to red
and
before it was changing from red back to green (which one sees today in Denmark, among other places, but nowhere in North America). There were strange regional one-offs that never caught on; for example, a signal at the corner of Wilshire and Western in Los Angeles had a small clock whose hand revealed to the approaching driver how much “green” or “red” time remained.
Were red and green even the right colors? In 1923 it was pointed out that approximately one in ten people saw only gray when looking at a traffic signal, because of color blindness. Might not blue and yellow, which almost everyone could see, be better? Or would that create catastrophic confusion among all those who had already learned red and green? Despite all the uncertainty, traffic engineering soon hoisted itself onto a wobbly pedestal of authority, even if, as the transportation historian Jeffrey Brown argues, engineers’ neutral-sounding Progressive scientific ideology, which compared “curing” congestion to fighting typhoid, reflected the desires of a narrow band of urban elites (i.e., car owners). Thus it was quickly established that the prime objective of a street was simply to move as many cars as quickly as possible—an idea that obscured, as it does to this day, the many other roles of city streets.
After more than a century of tinkering with traffic, plus years of tradition and scientific research, one would think all these issues would have been smoothed out. And they have been, largely. We drive in a landscape that looks virtually the same wherever we go: A red light in Morocco means the same thing as it does in Montana. A walk “man” that moves us across a street in Berlin does the same in Boston, even if the “man” looks a bit different. (The beloved jaunty, hat-clad
Ampelmännchen
of the former German Democratic Republic has survived the collapse of the Berlin Wall.) We drive on highways that have been so perfectly engineered we forget we are moving at high speeds—indeed, we are sometimes barely aware of moving at all.
For all this standardized sameness, though, there is much that is still simply not known about how to manage the flows of all those people in traffic—drivers, walkers, cyclists, and others—in the safest and most efficient manner. For example, you may have seen, in some cities, a “countdown signal” that indicates, in seconds, exactly how much time you have before the “Walk” signal will change to “Don’t Walk.” Some people in the traffic world think this innovation has made things better for pedestrians, but it is just as easy to find others who think it offers no improvement at all. Some people think that marked bicycle lanes on streets are the ideal for cyclists, while others prefer separated lanes; still others suggest that maybe having no bicycle lanes at all would be best for bike riders. For a time it was thought that highway traffic would flow better and more safely if trucks were forced to obey a slower speed limit than cars. But “differential speed limits” just seemed to swap out one kind of crash risk for another, with no overall safety benefit, so the “DSLs” were gradually rolled back.
Henry Barnes, the legendary traffic commissioner of New York City in the 1960s, reflecting on his long career in his charmingly titled memoir
The Man with the Red and Green Eyes,
observed that “traffic was as much an emotional problem as it was a physical and mechanical one.” People, he concluded, were tougher to crack than cars. “As time goes on the technical problems become more automatic, while the people problems become more surrealistic.”
That “surrealistic” side of traffic will be the focus of this book. I began my research with the intention of stopping to take a look around at an environment that has become so familiar we no longer see it; I wanted to slow down for a moment and think about what’s going on out there as we drive, walk, cycle, or find some other way to get around. (Look out for the
SKATEBOARD ROUTE
signs the next time you’re in Portland, Oregon.) My aim was to learn to read between the dotted lines on the highway, sift through the strange patterns that traffic contains, interpret the small feints, dodges, parries, and thrusts between vehicles. I would study not only the traffic signals we obey but also the traffic signals we send.
Many of us, myself included, seem to take driving a car fairly lightly, perhaps holding on to some simple myths of independence and power, but it is actually an incredibly complex and demanding task: We are navigating through a legal system, we are becoming social actors in a spontaneous setting, we are processing a bewildering amount of information, we are constantly making predictions and calculations and on-the-fly judgments of risk and reward, and we’re engaging in a huge amount of sensory and cognitive activity—the full scope of which scientists are just beginning to understand.
Much of our mobile life is still shrouded in mystery and murk. We welcome into our vehicles new technologies like cell phones, in-car navigation systems, and “radio display system” radios (which show song titles) before we have had time to understand the complicated effects those devices might have on our driving. Opinion is often divided on the most fundamental aspects of how we should do things. Should hands be at ten a.m. and two p.m. on the steering wheel, as we were once taught—or have air bags made that a dangerous proposition? When changing lanes, is it sufficient to simply signal and check the mirrors? Or should you turn your head and glance over your shoulder? Relying on mirrors alone leaves one open to blind spots, which engineers say can exist on any car (indeed, they almost seemed designed to occur at the most inconvenient and dangerous place, the area just behind and to the left of the driver). But turning your head means not looking forward, perhaps for that vital second. “Head checks are one of the most dangerous things you can do,” says the research director of a highway safety agency.
So what do we do? If these issues aren’t complicated enough, consider the right side-view mirror itself. In the United States, the driver will notice that their passenger side-view mirror is convex; it usually carries a warning such as “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” The driver’s side mirror is not. In Europe, both mirrors are convex. “What you have today is this clearly pretty wrong situation,” says Michael Flannagan, a researcher at the University of Michigan who specializes in driver vision. “It’s wrong in the sense that Europe does one thing, the U.S. does another. They can’t
both
be optimal. These are both entrenched traditions, neither of which is fully based on rational, explicit argument.” The mirror, as with so many things in traffic, is more complicated than it might appear.