How’s this for a sociology assignment? Study a place where millions of people — cutting across every cultural and economic divide — are in constant flux but in the same general state, day-after-day. I know what you’re thinking — just cue the hilariously smug REM video set in a traffic jam. That’s one way of thinking about traffic. Another way is the route Tom Vanderbilt takes in his monumental study Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (Knopf, 401 pages, $29.95).
Cars are now living rooms on wheels and Vanderbilt offers this proof early in his study. Most fast food is now wholly designed for one-handed eating, most notably “Taco Bell’s hexagonal Crunchwrap supreme.” Surprisingly, according to his numbers, the explosion in hours spent stuck in traffic has only driven off the charts in the last 10 years, with the rise of city and inner-suburb home prices and the emergence of the “extreme commuter”: those who spend in excess of two hours per day in traffic.
Above and beyond North America’s much-discussed — and little-experienced — romance with the car, a culture of myths and behaviours are firmly entrenched in our minds long before we ever sit behind the wheel. More dangerous however, is the central flaw of traffic — it brings together a mass amount of strangers hurling at high speeds and the rule of law is an abstract sense of “fairness” that drivers use to justify everything from self-satisfied humanist “waving in” to the pure murder of revenge tailgating.
“Traffic,” according to Vanderbilt, “is a living laboratory of human interaction, with subtle displays of implied power.” That’s why all drivers essentially believe they’re in the right, even the Humvee driver last week who U-turned onto a busy sidewalk where I was standing, causing me to jump into garbage. Since he then idled on the sidewalk, politely waiting for a gap, I was able to scream an ironworker’s dictionary of invective at him. He asked me with perfect conviction, “What is your problem?”
After establishing a game
theory–derived précis, Vanderbilt marshals an impressive collection of traffic facts and the science of jams to answer seemingly Zen riddles like, “Why does the other lane always seem to be moving faster?” and “Why do more roads always mean more traffic?” Commuters may feel like insects, but insects are far better at cooperation, the lack of which is the cause of “bad” traffic. While roads take the bulk of the book Vanderbilt opens his interest in human congestion up to include digressions on Disneyland lineups and a trip on the do-or-die bike lanes of Beijing where Vanderbilt is reminded of Kenneth Tynan’s remark that “bad driving tends to exist in inverse ratio to democratic institutions. In an authoritarian state, the only place where the little man achieves equality with the big is in heavy traffic.”
A traffic jam is a common excuse used every day, usually implicitly blaming the unseen forces of bad urban design or a random visitation of vehicular death, but, as Vanderbilt concludes, that excuse also obscures the real culprit — drivers themselves. Everyone cries indeed.