Stuck in the slow lane? ‘Traffic’ tells you why

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.

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.

Excerpted from "Traffic." Copyright © 2008 by Tom Vanderbilt. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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