Traffic
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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 In Moscow, the old images of Russians waiting in line have been replaced by images of idling cars stuck in heavy congestion.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.
Why Does the Other Lane Always Seem Faster? How Traffic Messes with Our Heads
Shut Up, I Can’t Hear You: Anonymity, Aggression, and the Problems of Communicating While Driving
HORN BROKEN. WATCH FOR FINGER.
—bumper sticker
In Motor Mania, a 1950 Walt Disney short, the lovably dim dog Goofy stars as “Mr. Walker,” a model pedestrian (on two legs). He is a “good citizen,” courteous and honest, the sort who whistles back at birds and wouldn’t “step on an ant.” Once Mr. Walker gets behind the steering wheel of his car, however, a “strange phenomenon takes place.” His “whole personality changes.” He becomes “Mr. Wheeler,” a power-obsessed “uncontrollable monster” who races other cars at stop lights and views the road as his own personal property (but still “considers himself a good driver”). Then he steps out of his car, and, deprived of his “personal armor,” reverts to being Mr. Walker. Every time he gets back into his car, despite the fact that he knows “how the other fellow feels,” he is consumed by the personality of Mr. Wheeler.
What Disney was identifying, in his brilliantly simple way, was a commonplace but peculiar fact of life: We are how we move. Like Goofy, I, too, suffer from this multiple personality disorder. When I walk, which as a New Yorker I often do, I view cars as loud, polluting annoyances driven by out-of-town drunks distracted by their cell phones. When I drive, I find that pedestrians are suddenly the menace, whacked-out iPod drones blithely meandering across the street without looking. When I ride a bike, I get the worst of both worlds, buffeted by speeding cars whose drivers resent my superior health and fuel economy, and hounded by oblivious pedestrians who seem to think it’s safe to cross against the light if “only a bike” is coming but are then startled and indignant as I whisk past at twenty-five miles per hour.
I am guessing this sort of thing happens to you as well. Let us call it a “modal bias.” Some of this has to do with our skewed perceptual senses, as I will discuss in Chapter 3. Some of it has to do with territoriality, like when bicyclists and pedestrians sharing a path yell at each other or someone pushing a triplet-sized stroller turns into the pedestrian version of the SUV, commandeering the sidewalk through sheer size. But something deeper and more transformative happens when we move from people who walk to people who drive. The “personal armor” described by Disney is perhaps not so far-fetched. One study of pedestrian fatalities by French researchers showed that a significant number were associated with a “change of mode”—for example, moving from car to foot—as if, the authors speculated, drivers leaving their vehicles still felt a certain invulnerability.
Psychologists have struggled to understand the “deviant driver,” creating detailed personality profiles to understand who’s likely to fall prey to “road rage.” An early mantra, originally applied to what was called the “accident-prone driver,” has long held sway: “A man drives as he lives.” This is why car insurance premiums are tied not only to driving history but, more controversially, to credit scores; risky credit, the thinking goes, correlates with taking risks on the road. The statistical association between lower credit scores and higher insurance losses is just that, however; the reasons why how one lives might be linked to how one drives are less clear. And as inquiries into this question typically involve questionnaires, they’re open to various self-reported response biases. How would you answer this sample question: Are you a raving psychopath on wheels? (Please check “never,” “sometimes,” or “always.”) Generally, these inquiries come to what hardly seem earth-shattering conclusions: that “sensation-seeking,” “risk-seeking,” “novelty-seeking,” and “aggressive” individuals tend to drive in a riskier, more aggressive manner. You weren’t going to bet your paycheck on daredevil drivers being the risk-averse people who crave quiet normalcy and routine, were you?
Even using a phrase like “road rage” lends a clinical legitimacy to what might simply be termed bad or boorish behavior elsewhere. “Traffic tantrums” is a useful alternative, nicely underscoring the raw childishness of aggressive driving. The more interesting question is not whether some of us are more prone to act like homicidal maniacs once we get behind the wheel but why we all act differently. What is going on seems to have less to do with a change in personality than with a change in our entire being. In traffic, we struggle to stay human.
Think of language, perhaps the defining human characteristic. Being in a car renders us mostly mute. Instead of complex vocabularies and subtle shifts in facial expression, the language of traffic is reduced—necessarily, for reasons of safety and economy—to a range of basic signals, formal and informal, that convey only the simplest of meanings. Studies have shown that many of these signals, particularly informal ones, are often misunderstood, especially by novice drivers. To take one example, the Reverend David Rowe, who heads a congregation in the wealthy Connecticut suburb of Fairfield and, improbably, is a great fan of the neopunk band Green Day, told me he was once driving down the road when he spotted a car with a Green Day bumper sticker. He honked to show his solidarity. For his efforts he was rewarded with a finger.
Even formal signals are sometimes hazy: Is that person who keeps driving with their right turn signal on actually going to turn or have they forgotten it’s still blinking? Unfortunately, there’s no way to ask the driver what they mean. This may lead to a rhetorical outburst: “Are you going to turn or not?” But you can’t ask; nor would there be a way to get an answer back. Frustrated by our inability to talk, we gesture violently or honk—a noise the offending driver might misinterpret. At some point you may have been the recipient of an unsolicited honk, to which you immediately responded with defensive anger—What?!—only to learn that the honker was trying to convey to you that you left your gas cap open. Thanks! Have a good one!
Traffic is riddled with such “asymmetries” in communication, as Jack Katz, a sociologist at the University of California in Los Angeles and the author of How Emotions Work, describe
s them. “You can see but you can’t be heard,” he told me. “In a very precise way, you’re made dumb. You can shout as much as you want but nobody’s going to hear you.”
Another way to think about this “asymmetry” is that while you can see a lot of other drivers making mistakes, you are less likely to see yourself doing so. (A former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, had a wonderful solution to this, hiring mimes to people the city’s crosswalks and silently mock drivers and pedestrians who violated traffic laws.) Drivers also spend much of their time in traffic looking at the rear ends of other cars, an activity culturally associated with subordination. It also tends to make the communication one-way: You’re looking at a bunch of drivers who cannot see you. “It’s like trying to talk to someone who’s walking in front of you, as opposed to someone who’s face-to-face with you,” Katz says. “We’re looking at everybody’s rear, and that’s not how human beings were set up to maximize their communicative possibility.”
This muteness, Katz argues, makes us mad. We are desperate to say something. In one study, in-car researchers pretended to be measuring the speed and distance perception of drivers. What they were really interested in was how their subjects would react to a honk from another driver. They made this happen by giving subjects instructions as they paused at a stop sign. They then had an accomplice pull up behind the stalled car and honk. More than three-quarters of the drivers reacted verbally, despite the fact they would not be heard by the honker.
When a driver is cut off by another driver, the gesture is read as rude, perhaps hostile. There is no way for the offending driver to indicate that it was anything but rude or hostile. Because of the fleeting nature of traffic, the act is not likely to be witnessed by anyone else. No one, save perhaps your passenger, will shake their heads in unison with you and say, “Can you believe he did that?” There are at least two possible responses. One is to speed ahead and cut the offending driver off in turn, to “teach them a lesson.” But there is no guarantee that the person receiving the lesson is aware of what they have done—and so your lesson simply becomes a provocation—or that they will accept your position as the “teacher” in any case. And even if your lesson is successful, you’re not likely to receive any future benefit. Another response is to use an “informal” traffic signal, like the middle finger (or, as is gaining currency in Australia, the pinkie, after an ad campaign by the Road and Traffic Authority to suggest that the person speeding or otherwise driving aggressively is overcompensating for deficient male anatomy). This gains power, Katz says, if the person you give the finger to visually registers that you’re giving him the finger. But what if that person merely gives the finger back?
Finally, it is often impossible to even send a message to the offending driver in the first place. Yet still we get visibly mad, to an audience of no one. Katz argues that we are engaging in a kind of theatrical storytelling, inside of our cars, angrily “constructing moral dramas” in which we are the wronged victims—and the “avenging hero”—in some traffic epic of larger importance. It is not enough to think bad thoughts about the other driver; we get angry, in essence, to watch ourselves get angry. “The angry driver,” Katz argues, “becomes a magician taken in by his or her own magic.” Sometimes, says Katz, as part of this “moral drama,” and in an effort to create a “new meaning” for the encounter, we will try to find out something after the fact about the driver who wronged us (perhaps speeding up to see them), meanwhile running down a mental list of potential villains (e.g., women, men, teenagers, senior citizens, truck drivers, Democrats, Republicans, “idiots on cell phones,” or, if all else fails, simply “idiots”) before finding a suitable resolution to the drama.
This seems an on-road version of what psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error,” a commonly observed way in which we ascribe the actions of others to who they are; in what is known as the “actor-observer effect,” meanwhile, we attribute our own actions to how we were forced to act in specific situations. Chances are you have never looked at yourself in the rearview mirror and thought, “Stupid #$%&! driver.” Psychologists theorize that the actor-observer effect may stem from one’s desire to feel more in control of a complex situation, like driving in traffic. It also just might be easier to chastise a “stupid driver” for cutting you off than to fully analyze the circumstances that caused this event to occur.
On a larger scale, it might also help explain, more than actual national or civic chauvinism, why drivers the world around have their own favorite traffic targets: “The Albanians are terrible drivers,” say the Greeks. “The Dutch are the worst drivers,” say the Germans. It’s best not to get New Yorkers started about New Jersey drivers. We even seem to make the fundamental attribution error in the way we travel. When bicyclists violate a traffic law, research has showed it is because, in the eyes of drivers, they are reckless anarchists; drivers, meanwhile, are more likely to view the violation of a traffic law by another driver as somehow being required by the circumstances.
At least some of this anger seems intended to maintain our sense of identity, another human trait that is lost in traffic. The driver is reduced to a brand of vehicle (a rough stereotype at best) and an anonymous license-plate number. We look for glimpses of meaning in this sea of anonymity: Think of the curious joy you get when you see a car that matches your own, or a license plate from your home state or country when you are in another. (Studies with experimental games have shown that people will act more kindly toward someone they have been told shares their birth date.) Some drivers, especially in the United States, try in vain to establish their identities with personalized vanity plates, but this raises the question of whether you really want your life summed up in seven letters—let alone why you want to tell a bunch of people you don’t know who you are! Americans seem similarly (and particularly) predisposed to putting cheap bumper stickers on their expensive cars—announcing the academic wizardry of their progeny, jocularly advising that their “other car is a Porsche,” or giving subtle hints (“MV”) of their exclusive vacation haunts. One never sees a German blazing down the autobahn with a PROUD TO BE GERMAN sticker.
Trying to assert one’s identity in traffic is always going to be problematic, in any case, because the driver yields his or her identity to the cars. We become, Katz says, cyborgs. Our vehicle becomes our self. “You project your body way out in front of a vehicle,” says Katz. “When somebody’s changed lanes a hundred yards ahead, you instantly feel you’ve been cut off. They haven’t touched you physically, they haven’t touched your car physically, but in order to adjust the wheel and acceleration and braking, you have projected yourself.” We say, “Get out of my way,” not “Get out of my and my car’s way.”
Identity issues seem to trouble the driver alone. Have you ever noticed how passengers rarely seem to get as worked up about these events as you do? Or that they may, in the dreaded case of the “backseat driver,” even question your part in the dispute? This may be because the passenger has a more neutral view. They do not feel that their identity is bound up with the car. Studies that have examined the brain activity of drivers and passengers as they engaged in simulated driving have shown that different neural regions are activated in drivers and passengers. They are, in effect, different people. Studies have also shown that solo drivers drive more aggressively, as measured by such indices as speed and following distance. It is as if, lacking that human accompaniment—and thus any sense of shame—they give themselves over to the car.
Like many everyday travails, this whole situation is succinctly illustrated in a hit country song, Chely Wright’s “The Bumper of My S.U.V.” The song’s protagonist complains that a “lady in a minivan” has given her the finger because of a United States Marines Corps bumper sticker on her SUV. “Does she think she knows what I stand for / Or the things that I believe,” sings Wright, “just because the narrarator has a bumper sticker for the U.S. Marines on the aforementioned bumper of her S.U.V.?” The first issue here is the st
ruggle over identity; the narrator is upset that her identity has been defined by someone else. But the narrator may be protesting too much: How else would we know the things that you stand for or believe if you did not have a bumper sticker on your SUV? And if you are resentful at having your identity pigeonholed, why put a pigeonholing sticker on your bumper in the first place?
In the absence of any other visible human traits, we do draw a lot of information from bumper stickers. This point was demonstrated by an experiment conducted in 1969 at California State College, a place marked by violent clashes between the Black Panther Party and the police. In the trial, fifteen subjects of varying appearance and type of car affixed a bright BLACK PANTHER sticker to their auto’s rear bumper. No one in the group had received traffic violations in the past year. After two weeks with the bumper sticker, the group had been given thirty-three citations. (The idea that people with distinguishing marks on their vehicle will be singled out for abuse or cause other disruptions of smooth traffic is just one of the problems with proposals to add scarlet letter–style designations to license plates; suggestions have ranged from identifying sex offenders in Ohio to marking the cars of the reckless drivers known as “hoons” in Australia.)
In being offended, the SUV driver has made several huge assumptions of her own. First, she has presumed that the finger had something to do with the bumper sticker, when in fact it could have been directed at a perceived act of aggressive driving on her part. Or could it have been the fact that this single driver was tooling around in a large SUV, inordinately harming the environment, putting pedestrians and drivers of cars at greater risk, and increasing the country’s dependence on foreign oil? Secondly, by invoking a “lady in a minivan,” later echoed by references to “private schools,” she is perpetuating a preemptive negative stereotype against minivans: that their drivers are somehow more elitist than the drivers of SUVs—which makes no sense as SUVs, on average, cost more than minivans. The narrator is guilty of the same thing she accuses the minivan driver of.