Traffic (55 page)

made on bicycles: From “Cycling for Everyone: The Key to Political and Public Support,” by John Pucher, Rutgers University. Document retrieved from
www.policy.rutgers.edu/faculty/pucher/BikeSummit2007COMP_Mar25.pdf
on April 8, 2007.

for minor injuries: The Kensington High Street statistics are found in Graeme Swinburne, “Report on Road Safety in Kensington High Street,” Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London.

“for no inconsiderable time”: Charles Dickens,
Sketches by Boz
(1835; repr. London: Penguin Classics, 1996), p. 92.

“you need freeways”: Walter Kulash, of Glatting Jackson, described to me a similar tension in terms of traffic flow. “One thing we have learned,” he said, “is that streets are always a bundle of competing interests. There is always going to be less of one thing if there is more of another thing. If there is more seclusion and streets are by their very layout incapable of carrying any through traffic…then a negative is going to pop up somewhere else. And that negative is unbearable arterial streets.”

twelfth-deadliest road in America: Scott Powers, “Colonial One of Nation’s Most Dangerous Roads,”
Orlando Sentinel,
November 21, 2004. The U.S. 19 information is taken from a survey conducted by NBC’s
Dateline;
see Josh Mankiewicz, “Dangerous Roads,”
Dateline,
June 7, 2005.

would have deemed safer: For the details of Eric Dumbaugh’s studies I have drawn on several sources. The first is his unpublished Ph.D. dissertation: “Safe Streets, Livable Streets: A Positive Approach to Urban Roadside Design” (Georgia Institute of Technology, August 2005). I also used a related article: Eric Dumbaugh, “Safe Streets, Livable Streets,”
Journal of the American Planning Association,
vol. 71, no. 3 (Summer 2005), pp. 283–300.

26 to 30 miles per hour: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, “Literature Review on Vehicle Travel Speeds and Pedestrian Injuries,” DOT HS 809 021, October 1999.

by some 10 percent: See, for example, M. Martens, S. Comte, and N. Kaptein, “The Effects of Road Design on Speed Behavior: A Literature Review,” Technical Research Centre of Finland VTT, Espoo, 1997. Moreover, a survey of street segments in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont revealed that on-street parking itself seems to have a safety benefit. The researchers write: “Our results suggest that on-street parking can also help to create a safer environment. While this statement seems to contradict most of the existing research, the reality is that lower speed roads (less than 35 mph) with on-street parking have far less severe and fatal crashes. In fact, lower speed streets without parking had a severe and fatal crash rate more than two times higher than the streets with parking. We also showed conclusively that drivers tended to travel slower in the presence of features such as on-street parking and small building setbacks. Slower vehicle speeds provide pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers more time to react, and when a crash does occur, the chance of it being life-threatening is greatly reduced.” See Wesley Marshall, Norman Garrick, and Gilbert Hansen, “Reassessing On-Street Parking,” paper presented at the Transportation Research Board meeting, January 2008, Washington, D.C.

“roadside conditions”: Richard F. Weingroff, “President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Federal Role in Highway Safety” (Washington, D. C.: Federal Highway Administration, 2003), retrieved at
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/safety.htm
.

they felt it was safer: N. J. Ward and G. J. S. Wilde, “Driver Approach Behaviour at an Unprotected Railway Crossing Before and After Enhancement of Lateral Sight Distances: An Experimental Investigation of a Risk Perception and Behavioural Compensation Hypothesis,”
Safety Science,
vol. 22 (1996), pp. 63–75.

raise property values: See, for example, S. E. Maco and E. G. McPherson, “A Practical Approach to Assessing Structure, Function, and Value of Street Tree Populations in Small Communities,”
Journal of Arboriculture,
vol. 29, no. 2 (March 2003).

from roadsides for decades: In a 1941 Chicago planning study titled
Subdivision Regulation,
for example, the author, Harold Lautner, wrote: “While it has been customary in the past to plant street trees between the street curb and the pedestrian walk, an alternate procedure is now recommended as preferable in some cases. Trees planted along the street curb increase the severity of motor accidents and in turn are easily subjected to traffic injury…and except on very wide streets, curb planted trees crowd in upon the traveled way. To plant street trees on the property side of pedestrian walks, away from the pavement and traffic, seems more desirable,
particularly on residential streets
” (emphasis in original). This would, of course, not only increase the speed of passing traffic, posing more of a risk to pedestrians, but would also remove a potential barrier to a car striking a pedestrian. From Southworth and Ben-Joseph,
Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities,
op. cit., p. 88.

Chapter Eight: How Traffic Explains the World

same space as New York City: This figure is taken from Richard L. Forstall, Richard P. Green, and James B. Pick, “Which Are the Largest: Why Published Populations for Major Urban Areas Vary So Greatly.” Accessed from the University of Illinois–Chicago “City Futures” conference Web site,
http://www.uic.edu/cuppa/cityfutures/
.

same lane as the cyclists: Dinesh Mohan,
The Road Ahead: Traffic Injuries and Fatalities in India
(New Delhi: Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme, Indian Institute of Technology; 2004), pp. 1–30.

but
before:
Lu Huapu, Shi Qixin, and Masato Iwasaki, “A Study on Traffic Characteristics at Signalized Intersections in Beijing and Tokyo,” Tsinghua University,
Proceedings of EASTS (The 2nd Conference of the Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies).

would mean “stop”: This story is discussed in Keesing’s Research Report,
The Cultural Revolution in China
(New York: Scribner, 1967), p. 18.

“can he actually
overtake
”: Kenneth Tynan,
The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2002), p. 101.

the entire street: The journalist Jan Wong, writing about Beijing in the 1980s, reported that “even state-owned cars were so rare that most Beijing intersections lacked traffic lights. Stop signs were non-existent. At night, cars were
required
to douse headlights to avoid blinding cyclists. With only a handful of vehicles on the road, no one worried about one car smashing into another in the dark.” See
Jan Wong’s China
(Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1999), p. 212.

as a social good?: For a good discussion of Mao’s “lawlessness” concept, see Chapter 10 of Zhengyuan Fu,
Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Politics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

public morality and civic culture: See, for example, Wen-shun Chi,
Ideological Conflicts in Modern China: Democracy and Authoritarianism
(New York: Transaction Publishers, 1986), p. 56.

“superior to them”: This quote comes from “Moral Embarrassment,”
Shanghai Star,
August 11, 2001.

“rights by litigation”: Albert H. Y. Chen, “Toward a Legal Enlightenment: Discussions in Contemporary China on the Rule of Law,”
UCLA Pacific Basin Law Journal,
vol. 17 (2000).

drive on the right: The information about which side of the road different countries drive on was obtained from Peter Kincaid’s exhaustive treatise
The Rule of the Road: An International Guide to History and Practice
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1986).

violation of the standard: The flashing of headlights in Europe also seems to be bluntly effective at getting people to move over. As a study of Austrian highway behavior showed, while demographic factors explained which drivers tended to drive faster and tailgate more aggressively (men driving expensive cars, as you might expect), there was also what the author called an “instrumental function”—the urge to “dominate” other drivers seemed to be the most effective way to encourage them to move over. “It was found that drivers who approach to under ten meters behind the camera car were more likely to displace the driver ahead,” the authors wrote. “Furthermore, drivers who approached faster displaced others more effectively.” Klaus Atzwanger and B. Ruso, in
Vision in Vehicles VI
(Amsterdam: Elsevier Science B.V., 1999), p. 197.

confusing array of laws: See, for example, the Web site maintained by John Carr,
http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.htm
.

rights have been violated: George McDowell, an economist at Virginia Tech, has offered the fascinating theory that a country’s traffic behavior is reflected in its economic system. In the United States, the supposed “free market” is, he argues, instead an “open market,” in which “rules, both formal and informal, govern behavior. Opportunistic behavior is expected and even encouraged but within a strict set of parameters.” In China, however, he argues, the system is better described as a “free market,” where “the only rule is caveat emptor.” The Chinese system of what he calls “advantage” means that horns are used less as a means to signal “road rage” but more to “notify other vehicles that you are there and will not give way.” Advantage “is gained,” he writes, “exploited by the person who gained it, and accepted by the person bested.” In the United States this acceptance is less likely to occur. See George R. McDowell, “The Market as Traffic: An Economic Metaphor,”
Journal of Economic Issues,
vol. 38 (2004), pp. 270–74.

acts more personally: American roads are also more crowded than the expensive Italian
autostrada.
This brings up the issue that it may be more difficult for drivers to “get over” and meet the demands of the driver to the rear; there is also the larger issue that giving up an entire lane to a few people wishing to go fast, with all the lane changing that entails, can be poor use of the traffic network.

fairness and equality: According to the political scientist Robert Putnam, this dynamic is more prevalent in the southern regions of Italy. These, he argued, have historically lacked a strong civic culture, being dominated instead by feudalistic patronage relationships and an “amoral familism”—worry about yourself and trust that everyone will look after themselves. Instead of “horizontal” networks of reciprocal relations and trust among the community, Putnam argues, the south has been dominated by more vertical, patron-client-style relationships. From Robert Putnam,
Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

jaywalking:
The historian Peter Norton, in an exemplary article, traces the etymology of the word to at least 1909, well before the 1917 Boston usage registered by the second edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary
in 1989. Norton traces the rise of the word in the popular imagination as pedestrians saw gradually eroded their longstanding right to a shared use of city streets, in favor of a historically unprecedented edict, as described by one writer, upon the arrival of the automobile: “The streets are for vehicle traffic, the sidewalks for pedestrians.” Jaywalking, in essence, marginalized and even criminalized what had been standard urban behavior. This was done ostensibly in the name of safety, but as Norton notes, its real aim was to clear urban streets for the increased circulation of vehicular traffic (other, potentially more effective, safety measures like speed “governors” for cars were overridden by motoring interests). Peter D. Norton, “Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street,”
Technology and Culture,
vol. 48 (April 2007), pp. 331–59.

in which he was raised: Aksel Sandemose,
A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936).

rules of grammar: Sanford W. Gregory Jr. compared traffic behavior in Egypt to a “verdant grammar,” one not “yet ripened by centuries of social-interactive maturation.” The arrival of mass driving in Egypt, he suggests, happened too quickly for Western traffic patterns to be institutionalized, so instead a kind of pidgin or creole language was formed, with distinct rules, as is often the case “when mature speakers of diverse dominant language groups meet.” Without time to create a formal order of its own, Egypt’s drivers invented a brutally effective slang of sorts. Gregory commented that this seemed based more on eye contact and informal signals than in the West. See Gregory, “Auto Traffic in Egypt as a Verdant Grammar,”
Social Psychology Quarterly,
vol. 48, No. 4 (December 1985), pp. 337–48.

each side of the street: This story is mentioned in William Muray,
City of the Soul: A Walk in Rome
(New York: Crown, 2003), p. 26.

Mythological status: H. V. Morton, in his 1957 travelogue
A Traveler in Rome,
observed, while riding in a taxi: “The cars around us, which were traveling just as fast as we were, swerved aside by one of those instinctive Italian motoring movements not unlike birds in formation who part and form again” (1957; repr., New York: Da Capo, 2002), p. 135.

one-fifth of the traffic: Michele Faberi, Marco Martuzzi, and Franco Pirrami,
Assessing the Health Impact and Social Costs of Mopeds: Feasibility Study in Rome
(Rome: World Health Organization, 2004), p. xvii.

fewer riders wear helmets: The helmet-use rates come from F. Servadei, C. Begliomini, E. Gardini, M. Giustini, F. Taggi, and J. Kraus, “Effect of Italy’s Motorcycle Helmet Law on Traumatic Brain Injuries,”
Injury Prevention,
vol. 9, no. 3 (2003), pp. 257–60.

collisions with cars: Giuseppe Latorre, Giuliano Bertazzoni, Donato Zotta, Edward Van Beeck, and Gualtiero Ricciardi, “Epidemiology of Accidents Among Users of Two-Wheeled Motor Vehicles: A Surveillance Study in Two Italian Cities,”
European Journal of Public Health,
vol. 12, no. 2 (2002), pp. 99–103.

(and getting away with it): R. B. Cialdini, L. J. Demaine, B. J. Sagarin, D. W. Barrett, K. Rhoads, and P. L. Winter, “Managing Social Norms for Persuasive Impact,”
Social Influence,
vol. 1 (2006), pp. 3–15.