Traffic

by Tom Vanderbilt

  In many cases, like on East Colonial Drive, that is exactly what happened. The traffic world was brought to the social world. The design is well in line with the stated current engineering guidance: “The wider the clear zone, the safer it is.” But far from ensuring safety, the road was home to more crashes than the section of the street that looked more like a traditional city street, even though the traffic was similar. What went wrong?

  Part of the problem may be the in-betweenness of the newer sections of East Colonial. Walter Kulash, another noted traffic engineer with Glatting Jackson, says traffic engineers are not always to blame. Roads like Highway 50, he told me, are being used in ways engineers never intended. Designed as arteries to ferry people from one city cluster to another, they have instead become the “Main Streets” for suburban sprawl, lined with busy shopping centers and strip malls. “The engineers had nothing to do with that development, fronted by parking, for miles along the arterials, like you saw on Colonial Drive,” Kulash said. “That is highly injurious to the function of the highway. The fact that fifty thousand travelers a day are bundled together, thereby making that irresistible to commerce, you might say, Okay, who’s responsible for that? But you can hardly say a majority of blame ought to go to highway engineers.”

  From a strict engineering perspective, the “proving ground” approach makes sense. As Phil Jones, a traffic engineer based in the Midlands of England, argues, engineers are taught to work in “failure” mode. To design a bridge on a highway, engineers calculate the loads the bridge will need to carry, find out at which point the bridge would fail, and then make it more safe than that, for redundancy. But what happens when the factors involved are not just loads and stresses but the more infinitely complex range of humans behind the wheel?

  In designing the approach path to a T-intersection, engineers use the factor of driver reaction time to determine what the appropriate sight distance should be—that is, the point at which the driver should have a clear view of the intersection. The sight distance is typically made longer than needed, to accommodate drivers with the slowest reaction times (e.g., the elderly). As with the highway bridge, the road design has a safety cushion to help it withstand extremes. So far, so good. But designing the road for slow reaction times, Jones explains, creates “very long sight distances, so someone who’s younger and more able and can react faster than that will consume that benefit. What the safety model doesn’t recognize is that yes, the elderly person will react more slowly, but they’re not the ones driving fast in the first place. You’re giving license to people to drive more quickly.” This may be why, as studies have shown, railroad crossings where the sight distance is restricted—that is, you can see less of the track and the oncoming train—do not have higher crash rates than those with better views. Drivers approached the tracks more quickly when they felt it was safer.

  What is meant to be the “forgiving road,” argues Dumbaugh, becomes the “permissive road.” Safety features meant to reduce the consequences of driver error encourage drivers to drive in a way requiring those generous safety provisions. Sometimes, passive-safety engineering makes things more dangerous. Dumbaugh studied a Florida road on which a number of cars had crashed into trees and poles. Simple, right? Just get rid of the obstacles and make the clear zones bigger. Looking carefully at the crash records, however, Dumbaugh found that the majority of crashes happened at intersections and driveways, as cars were turning. Were the obstacles the problem or was it, as Dumbaugh suggested, that drivers were unable to complete the turn because they were traveling too fast as they entered the turn, at the high speed the road design was telling them was “safe”?

  In both Drachten and London, choices were made to remove traffic-safety infrastructure like signs and barriers. These choices were influenced by aesthetics, but they had the perverse outcome of making things safer. The problem with applying typical highway-engineering solutions to cities, villages, and the other places people live is that the same things that often signify “livability” are, in the eyes of a traffic engineer, “hazards.”

  Take the case of trees. In my Brooklyn neighborhood, they add to the desirability of a street. They raise property values. They may protect pedestrians from wayward cars. Yet they’re also a common bane of traffic engineers, who have been—perhaps with the best of intentions—removing them from roadsides for decades. While many people have indeed died from colliding with trees, there is nothing inherently dangerous about a tree. What matters is the context. In his research Dumbaugh looked at a section of a road in Florida that travels through Stetson University. It’s lined with mature trees, a few feet from the road. In four years, Dumbaugh found, there was not a single crash. What’s more, he observed, most cars traveled at or even below the speed limit of 30 miles per hour (which many studies—and probably your own experience—have shown is rarely the case in cities). The hazards were the safety device. Drivers left with little room for error seemed quite capable of not making errors, or at least driving at a speed that would help “forgive” their own error.

  The tree-lined road goes against the typical engineering paradigm, which would have deemed the trees unsafe and in need of removal. With the trees (the potential source of system failure) removed, a typical pattern would have happened: Speeds would have increased. The risk to pedestrians (students at Stetson, mostly) would have gone up; perhaps a pedestrian would have been struck. The police would have been called in to set up speed traps. Eventually, vertical deflection—a.k.a. speed bumps—would have been installed to calm the traffic. Having made the road safer, new measures would have been needed to again make it safe.

  The pursuit of a kind of absolute safety, above all other considerations of what makes places good environments, has not only made those streets and cities less attractive, it has, in many cases, made them less safe. The things that work best in the traffic world of the highway—consistency, uniformity, wide lanes, knowing what to expect ahead of time, the reduction of conflicts, the restriction of access, and the removal of obstacles—have little or no place in the social world.

  How Traffic Explains the World:

  On Driving with a Local Accent

  “Good Brakes, Good Horn, Good Luck”:

  Plunging into the Maelstrom of Delhi Traffic

  Opening his eyes, he would know the place by the rhythm of movements in the street long before he caught any characteristic detail.

  —Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

  “What other city in the world is like Delhi?” demanded Qamar Ahmed, the city’s joint commissioner of traffic, as we sat drinking chai in his office. Clad in a khaki uniform topped with bright epaulettes on each shoulder, Ahmed brusquely shifted his attention between me and any one of the three mobile phones on his desk that kept ringing. An air conditioner labored against the enveloping premonsoon heat. “Delhi has forty-eight modes of transport, each struggling to occupy the same space on the carriageway. What other city is like this?”

  To exit the Indira Gandhi International Airport, typically at night, when the international flights arrive, and alight into one of the city’s ubiquitous black-and-yellow Ambassador cabs is to enter a motorized maelstrom. As an anticongestion measure, trucks are allowed into Delhi only between ten p.m. and six a.m., and so the sparsely lit road is thronged with lorries. They lurch, belch smoke, and ceaselessly toot their pressure horns. This seems by invitation: The back of most trucks bears the brightly festooned legend “Horn Please,” often accompanied by a request to “Use Dipper at Night” (this means “dim your lights”). “Horn Please” originally invited following drivers to honk if they wanted to pass the slower-moving, lane-hogging trucks on the narrower roads of the past, and I was told that it endures merely as a decorative tradition. Nevertheless, a cacophony of claxons filled the air.

  By day, the mayhem is revealed as true chaos. Delhi’s streets play host to a bewildering stream of zigzagging green-and-yellow auto-rickshaws, speeding cabs, weaving bicyclists, slow
-moving oxen-drawn carts, multi-passengered motorcycles conveying helmetless children and sari-clad women who struggle to keep their clothing from getting tangled in the chain, and heaving buses, which are often forced out of the bus-only lane because it is filled with cyclists and pedestrians, who are themselves in the lane because there tends to be no sidewalk, or “footpath,” as they say in Delhi. If there is a footpath, it is often occupied by people sleeping, eating, selling, buying, or simply sitting watching the traffic go by. Limbless beggars and young hawkers converge at each intersection, scratching at the windows as drivers study the countdown signals that tell them when the traffic lights will change. Endearingly, if hopelessly, the signals have been embellished with a single word: RELAX. In the roundabouts of New Delhi, the traffic whizzes and weaves defiantly past faded safety signs bearing blunt messages like OBEY TRAFFIC RULES, AVOID BLOOD POOL and DON’T DREAM OTHERWISE YOU’LL SCREAM. These signs are as morbidly whimsical as they are common, leading one to suspect that somewhere, lurking in Delhi’s Public Works Department, is a desk-bound bureaucrat with the soul of a poet.

  The most striking feature of Delhi traffic is the occasional presence of a cow or two, often lying idly in the median strip, feet away from traffic. The medians, it is said, provide a resting place that is not only dry but kept free from pesky flies by the buffeting winds of passing cars. I posed the question of cows to Maxwell Pereira, Delhi’s former top traffic cop, who has of late been playing the Colonel Pinto character on Indian Sesame Street. “Let me correct a little misperception,” he told me as we sat in his office in the Gurgaon district. “The presence of a cow in a congested urban area is no hazard. Much as I don’t like the presence of a cow on the road when I am advocating smoother traffic and convenience, the presence of a cow also forces a person to slow down. The overall impact is to reduce the tendency to overspeed and to rashly and negligently drive.” Cows, in effect, act as the “mental speed bumps” that Australian traffic activist David Engwicht described in Chapter 7. They provide “intrigue and uncertainty,” as Engwicht put it, and the average Delhi driver would certainly rather be late for work than hit a cow.

  I heard that particularly Indian phrase—“rash and negligent driving”—often while in Delhi, but after a few days I started to lose sight of how that could differ from the norm. Delhi drivers have a chronic tendency to stray between lanes, most alarmingly those flowing in the opposite direction. The only signal used with regularity is the horn. Instead of working brake lights (or indeed any lights), many trucks have the phrase KEEP DISTANCE painted on the back, a subtle reminder to the driver behind: I may stop at any moment. Some taxis, on the other hand, bear the inscription KEEP DISTANCE. POWER BRAKE. This means: I may come to a stop faster than you expect.

  Many vehicles lack side rearview mirrors, or keep them folded in. Auto-rickshaw wallahs actually mount their side-view mirrors on the inside, presumably to keep them from getting clipped off—or from clipping others. When changing lanes, drivers seem to rely not on the mirrors but rather that the person behind them will honk if there is danger. (It is not uncommon, meanwhile, to see scores of bus passengers leaning out the windows and advising the driver about whether he can merge, or trying to guide traffic themselves.) As a result of this collective early warning system, the sound of horns, on a road like Janpath in New Delhi, is as constant as birdcalls. When I asked one taxi driver, who went by the moniker J.P., how he coped with Delhi traffic, his answer was quick: “Good brakes, good horn, good luck.”

  After spending some time in the city, one vacillates between thinking Delhi drivers (and pedestrians) are either the best or worst in the world—the best because they’re so adept at maneuvering in tight spaces and tricky situations, or the worst because they put themselves there to begin with. “That is why we have a negative connotation to the phrase ‘defensive driving’ in India,” said Pereira, who still speaks in the flowery but formal vernacular of Indian officialdom. “Defensive driving is defending yourself from all the vagaries, including the negligence contribution on the part of the other road user.” Pereira advised me not to try Delhi traffic firsthand: “The Indian driver relies more on his reflexes, absolutely. Your reflexes would not be geared to expect the unexpected.”

  Conversely, when Pereira finds himself in the United States visiting relatives, his passengers, who may fail to appreciate the lingering aftereffects of Delhi traffic, are often perturbed by his driving style. “When I see a vehicle approaching from a side road, I tense up. Internally, I’m used to a condition in India where I’m not sure if when they are coming from the side road they will step into my path,” he said, adding that in the States, “you expect that he will never; here I will not expect that he will never. The halt-and-proceed thing is not there.”

  Arguably, drivers anywhere should always try to expect the unexpected, but this is taken to a kind of high art in Delhi, where the unexpected perversely becomes the expected. There are nearly 110 million traffic violations per day in Delhi, I was told by Rohit Baluja as we sat in his office in the Okhla Industrial Area, eating lunch out of the small metal pails known as tiffins.

  The dapper and successful owner of a shoe company, Baluja founded the Institute of Road Traffic Education in an effort to improve the conditions of Indian roads, on which an estimated 100,000 people die every year—one out of every ten road deaths in the world. He launched IRTE after a succession of business trips to Germany, where he was astounded by the well-defined and relatively orderly traffic system. “As soon as I returned to Delhi it felt as if everybody here is stealing your right-of-way, and that nobody understands there is something called a right-of-way,” he said. In 2002, a group of English police studying Delhi traffic told Baluja that whereas in the United Kingdom one can predict with 90 percent certainty the behavior of the average road user, in Delhi they felt that no more than 10 percent compliance could be anticipated. They called it anarchy on the roads. “We have started living in indiscipline, so we don’t feel there is an indiscipline,” Baluja told me.

  The estimate of daily traffic violations was obtained by IRTE researchers who followed and filmed random vehicles on the streets of Delhi in a camera-and-radar-equipped SUV they called the Interceptor. I was shown a sample of this footage by Amandeep Singh Bedi, a researcher at IRTE, and all the “vagaries” that Pereira had been discussing came to light. In one clip, a driver is rear-ended when he stops his car suddenly in the middle of a busy road. Why did he stop? So he could buckle his seat belt and not be challaned, or fined, by a traffic cop posted on the side of the road. In another, a bus illegally halts far from the marked curbside bus stop, making harried passengers weave through several traffic streams simply to board the bus. It soon becomes clear that one reason the number of violations is so high is that many drivers are forced to violate the rules in reaction to another driver violating the rules: The bus lane is filled with pedestrians or bicycles (who, in fairness, have nowhere else to go), so the bus cannot travel in the bus lane; thus begins a cascade of violations across the traffic stream.

  Not everything can be strictly blamed on the driver. Lane markings are often missing, shattered wrecks sit in the middle of busy roads, foliage obscures traffic lights, and sometimes traffic signs in Delhi are no more than small, barely legible hand-lettered placards taped to utility poles; a “No U-Turn” sign may look more like a suburban garage-sale announcement. These are created by an artist with the Delhi Traffic Police. “Sometimes there is a gap in my request [for a new sign] and their installation,” Ahmed admitted to me with a sigh. “To fill up this gap we make these signs.”

  Things are even worse in the countryside. “Our highways are built by consultants from across the world,” Baluja said. “They have got no idea of mixed traffic conditions. Highways have been built cutting across villages. Villagers cross still, but underpasses were not made for them.” And so what is meant to be a restricted-access highway becomes, unintentionally, a small village road, with animals crossing, vendors sellin
g fruit and newspapers on the median strip, and bus passengers queuing up for buses that have stopped directly on the carriageway. Openings are cut into guardrails, or the guardrails themselves are stolen for scrap. In vain, localities do things like erect stop signs on high-speed national highways—taking “expect the unexpected” to a new level.

  On one of my last days in Delhi, I witnessed an episode that seemed to contain the exasperating essence of the Delhi traffic experience. One afternoon, as the temperature swelled to over one hundred degrees, the air pregnant with the weight of the rainy season, I saw a funeral procession on the famously bustling Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi. A group of men were bearing aloft a body draped in white fabric and marigold garlands, jostling through the traffic of cycle-rickshaws, pedestrians, scooters, and carts heaped high with produce. A thought occurred to me then: The living may indeed fear for their lives on Delhi roads, but even the dead have to fight for space.

  Why New Yorkers Jaywalk (and Why They Don’t in Copenhagen): Traffic as Culture

  One of the first things that strikes a visitor to a new country is the traffic. This happens in part simply because foreign traffic, like a foreign currency or language, represents a different standard. The cars look odd (who makes that?), the road widths may feel unusual, the traffic may drive on the other side of the road, the speed limits may be higher or lower than one is used to, and one may struggle, as one does with shower-heads at the hotel, with traffic signs that look somewhat familiar but still escape interpretation: A particular symbol might refer to rocks falling or sheep crossing the road—or both, at the same time. I was once in the back of a London taxi when I saw a red-and-white traffic sign that declared, CHANGED PRIORITIES AHEAD. Whose priorities, I thought with a panic—mine? All of ours?