Traffic

by Tom Vanderbilt

  Most of the standard stuff is fairly simple, requiring only slight adjustments to adapt. The more difficult thing to crack is the traffic culture. This is how people drive, how people cross the street, how power relations are made manifest in those interactions, what sorts of patterns emerge from the traffic. Traffic is a sort of secret window onto the inner heart of a place, a form of cultural expression as vital as language, dress, or music. It’s the reason a horn in Rome does not mean the same thing as a horn in Stockholm, why flashing your headlights at another driver is understood one way on the German autobahn and quite another way on the 405 in Los Angeles, why people jaywalk constantly in New York and hardly at all in Copenhagen. These are the impressions that stick with us. “Greek drivers are crazy,” the visitor to Athens will observe, safely back in Kabul.

  But what explains this traffic culture? Where does it come from? Why did I find the traffic in Delhi so strange? Why does Belgium, a country for all intents and purposes quite similar to the neighboring Netherlands, have comparatively riskier roads? Is it the quality of the roads, the kinds of cars driven, the education of the drivers, the laws on the books, the mind-set of the people? The answer is complicated. It may be a bit of all of these things. There does, however, seem to be one overarching, “rule of thumb” way to measure the traffic culture of a country, its degrees of order or chaos, safety or danger; we will return to this in the next section.

  The first thing to recognize is that traffic culture is relative. One reason Delhi traffic feels intense to outsiders is simple population density: The metropolitan area of Delhi packs five times the people into the same space as New York City, a place that already feels pretty crowded. More people, more traffic, more interactions. Another reason Delhi seems so chaotic (to me, at least) is the staggering array of vehicles, all moving at different speeds and in different ways. The forty-eight modes of transport I referred to earlier are a far cry from those of my hometown, New York City, which has roughly five: cars, trucks, bicycles, pedestrians, and motorcycles or scooters (with a few horse-drawn carriages and cycle-rickshaws thrown in for tourists). Many places in the United States are essentially down to two modes: cars and trucks.

  Geetam Tiwari, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, has posited that what may look like anarchy in the eyes of conventional traffic engineering (and Western drivers) actually has a logic all its own. Far from breaking down into gridlock, she suggests, the “self-optimized” system of Delhi can actually move more people at the busiest times than the standard models would imply. When traffic is moving briskly on two- and three-lane roads, bicycles tend to form an impromptu bike lane in the curb lane; the more bikes, the wider the lane. But when traffic begins to get congested, when the flows approach 2,000 cars per lane per hour and 6,000 bikes per lane per hour, the system undergoes a change. The bicyclists (and motorcyclists) start to “integrate,” filling in the “longitudinal gaps” between cars and buses. Cars slow dramatically, bikes less so. The slowly moving queues grow not only lengthwise but laterally, squeezing out extra capacity from the roads.

  In so-called homogenous traffic flows, where every vehicle is roughly the same size and same type, lane discipline makes sense: You cannot fit two cars into one lane. It is also easy to figure out the maximum capacity of a road and to try to predict driver behavior through relatively simple traffic models like the previously discussed “car following.” But in heterogeneous traffic flows, like Delhi’s, where nonmotorized traffic can make up as much as two-thirds of the traffic stream, those formal models are of little use—having bicycles or scooters queue one per lane at a traffic light, for example, would create massive traffic jams.

  It can be unnerving to sit at a Delhi intersection in the back of an auto-rickshaw and feel humanity press to within inches, or to see bicycles slowly thread between teeming lorries. When the traffic compresses in this way, the number of what engineers call conflicts increases—there are, to put it simply, more chances for someone to try to occupy the same space at the same time as someone else. In conventional traffic-engineering thought, the more conflict, the less safe the system. But again, Delhi challenges preconceptions. In a study of various locations around Delhi, Tiwari and a group of researchers found that the sites that had a low conflict rate tended to have a high fatality rate, and vice versa. In other words, the seeming chaos functioned as a kind of safety device. More conflicts meant lower speeds, which meant fewer chances for fatal crashes. The higher the speeds, the better the car and truck traffic flowed, the worse it was for the bicycles and pedestrians. Even when the roads were crowded, however, they were hardly ideal for cyclists. Studies show that 62 percent of the cycle fatalities during peak hours were because of collisions with trucks and buses, which tend to use the same lane as the cyclists. Self-organization clearly has its limits.

  The second point is that traffic culture can be more important than laws or infrastructure in determining the feel of a place. In China, which is undergoing the fastest motorization in history, the power of traffic culture was made clear to me one afternoon as I sat studying an intersection in the Jingan neighborhood of Shanghai, from the God’s-eye perspective of my thirteenth-floor hotel room. At first glance, the intersection, ringed by office buildings and well marked with signs and signals, was unremarkable. But then I took a closer look.

  Traffic engineers note that signalized four-way intersections have over fifty total points of conflict, or places where the turning movements and crisscrossing flows might interfere. At the intersection of Shimen Yilu and Weihai Lu, that number seemed hopelessly low. As groups of cars hurtled toward other groups of cars, I fully expected to see a collision. Instead, time seemed to slow, space compressed like an accordion, and in that small cluster the various parties worked a way through. Then the accordion expanded again, the space opened up, and the speed increased as all the parties went on their way. It seemed to be orchestrated by some giant invisible hand.

  But the sheer range of ways for things to go wrong was staggering. Cars moving down Weihai Lu will use the oncoming left-turn lane to pass cars moving in the same direction. Bikes coming down Shimen Yilu and wanting to turn left onto Weihai Lu will park themselves in the middle of the big intersection, waiting to find an opening in three lanes of oncoming traffic. A pedestrian escapes one right-turning car only to be almost hit by a left-turning bicycle, who in turn narrowly avoids being struck by a vehicle that has crossed the yellow line to get around another car. There is no left-turn arrow, so when Shimen Yilu northbound gets the green, all four lanes of cars begin to move. But the cars turning left must navigate the two-way stream of bike and moped traffic before plunging farther into the wide, crowded zebra-striped pedestrian crosswalk. Cars pay little heed to the pedestrians crossing; even if there are huge massings, the cars will still push through, sometimes stranding pedestrians between two streams of probing cars. The two-way bike traffic does not look to necessarily follow any rule of thumb regarding being on the right or left, and on Weihai Lu, it’s not uncommon to see bikes almost have head-on collisions.

  In theory, this intersection could have been anywhere, from Houston to Hamburg. But what went on within that intersection was something else entirely. Crossings continued after the lights had changed, pedestrians seemed to cross as if they had given up on life, and drivers seemed to be doing their best to oblige that wish.

  In a study a few years ago, a group of researchers examined a number of intersections in Tokyo and a number of comparable intersections in Beijing. Physically, the intersections were essentially the same. But those in Tokyo handled up to twice as many vehicles in an hour. What was the difference? The researchers had several ideas. One was that Tokyo had more new and higher-quality vehicles, which could start and stop more quickly. Another was that by contrast with Tokyo, Beijing had many more bicycles. In 2000, bicycles still accounted for 38 percent of all daily trips in the city, with cars at 23 percent, according to the Beijing Transportation Research Center (the
gap has since been closing). Bicycles, the researchers noted, were often not separate from the main traffic flow, and so weaving bikes caused “lateral disturbance.”

  The most important difference had nothing to do with the quality or composition of Beijing’s traffic flow; it concerned the behavior of its participants. In Tokyo, signal compliance by cars and pedestrians was, like Japanese culture itself, rigorously formal and polite. In Beijing, the researchers observed, drivers (and cyclists and pedestrians) were much more likely to violate traffic signals. People not only entered the intersection after the light had changed, the researchers found, but before. This impression was confirmed to me by Scott Kronick, a longtime Beijing resident who heads Ogilvy Public Relations’ Chinese division. “Driving in China is total offense—you go for it. You’ll see people on the green light trying to take left-hand turns before the traffic goes through.”

  One of the more outlandish transportation proposals made by the Red Guards during China’s Cultural Revolution—along with banning private vehicles and demanding that rickshaw passengers pedal the rickshaws—was to change the meaning of traffic lights: Red would mean “go,” green would mean “stop.” To look at Chinese cities today, you might not realize that the proposal never took hold.

  At first, the traffic disorder seems a bit surprising, given the strictness of the Chinese government in other areas of life (e.g., blocking Web sites). Then again, jostling traffic is not going to bring down a regime. The British playwright Kenneth Tynan observed in his Diaries, after seeing the wreckage of a car crash in Turkey, “Bad driving—i.e. fast and reckless 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. Only there can he actually overtake.” As amateur sociology, this is pretty good stuff. And people in China—drivers, pedestrians, cyclists—did at times seem to be going out of their way to assert their presence, to claim some ownership of the road.

  This became clear one afternoon as I went cycling with Jonathan Landreth, the Beijing correspondent for Hollywood Reporter and a regular cyclist. Even within the bike lane, things were more complex than they seemed. Simply by having a mountain bike with gears, I was able to ride much faster than the typical Chinese commuter on their heavy Flying Pigeon, who years ago would have commanded the entire street. But I was still not top of the food chain in the bike lane—faster still are the electric-powered bicycles, one of which almost hit me head-on. Then there are the motorized three-wheeled vehicles commissioned to transport Beijing’s handicapped—and, it seemed, to add to their ranks. “Those guys use the bike lane too,” Landreth told me, “and they get really annoyed when you’re in the way.”

  I was given another theory on Chinese traffic behavior by Liu Shinan, a columnist at the China Daily, a government-owned newspaper. I happened to be in China at a time when several vigorous campaigns were under way, in part to improve traffic before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In Shanghai, officials were threatening to post photographs of jaywalkers in their place of business. Liu thought the tactic might work. “We Chinese attach importance to face,” he told me as we sat in the newspaper’s canteen. “When they jaywalk they don’t care too much about it, because all the people around them are strangers. They don’t think they have lost face. But if you published a photo in my unit here, I would feel very embarrassed.” What was happening in Shanghai was, in essence, a version of the eBay-style reputation-management system discussed earlier in this book. But why were such measures deemed necessary? The roots of Beijing’s traffic lawlessness, Liu suggested to me, lie in history. “After the Cultural Revolution, which lasted for ten years, it was a chaotic society,” he said. “People didn’t show any respect to any law, because Chairman Mao encouraged the people to revolt, to question authority.”

  So were these countless infractions little acts of everyday rebellion? Were drivers still paying heed to Mao’s praise of “lawlessness” as a social good? Or can the roots of China’s disorganized traffic be traced even further back? It has long been argued, for example, that Confucian ethics, which emphasize personal relationships and the cultivation of private virtues, contribute to a diminished sense of public morality and civic culture. In his 1935 best-seller My Country and My People, Lin Yutang wrote that the lack of “personal rights” had led to an individualistic, deep-seated indifference toward the public good. “We are great enough to elaborate a perfect system of official impeachment and civil service and traffic regulations and library reading-room rules,” Lin Yutang observed, “but we are also great enough to break all systems, to ignore them, circumvent them, play with them, and become superior to them.” In opposition to the Socratic tradition of the West, Confucianism emphasizes personal ethics and virtues over the “rule of law.” As the legal scholar Albert H. Y. Chen writes, “in situations where there were disputes, people were encouraged to compromise and give concessions rather than to assert their self-interest or rights by litigation.” Indeed, one can find echoes of this on the streets of China today. In the span of a few weeks, I saw several instances where minor traffic collisions had occurred. When this happens in the United States, drivers generally exchange insurance information and move on; in Beijing, the parties involved were engaged in heated negotiation, often surrounded by a crowd that had enthusiastically joined the proceedings.

  In China, things were happening in traffic faster than the government could keep pace. A few decades ago, a city such as Beijing did not have much in the way of cars, or even commutes. Privately owned vehicles were illegal, and many workers lived and worked in the same unit, known as the danwei. In 1949, Beijing had 2,300 automobiles. In 2003 it had 2 million—and this number is rapidly growing, with the capital adding upward of 1,000 new cars a day. A sweeping new Road Safety Act, the country’s first, was passed in 2004 to cope with the radically changing traffic dynamics, but it has not been without controversy, particularly when it comes to assigning fault in a crash. Zhang Dexing, with the Beijing Transportation Research Center, told me of a well-known case in 2004 that involved a husband and wife, new arrivals to the city, who were illegally walking on the highway. A driver struck the two, killing the wife. Although the pedestrians’ presence on the highway was illegal, the driver was still found partially at fault and was forced to pay the husband several hundred thousand renminbi (nearly U.S. $20,000).

  One key to understanding traffic culture is that laws themselves can explain only so much. As important, if not more so, are the cultural norms, or the accepted behavior of a place. Indeed, laws are often just norms that have been codified. Take the example of the laws that say that in the United States, one must drive on the right side of the road, while in the United Kingdom, one must drive on the left side of the road. These emerged not from careful scientific study or lengthy legislative debate about the relative safety of each approach but from cultural norms that existed long before the car.

  As the historian Peter Kincaid describes it, the reason why you drive on the right or left today has to do with two things. The first is that most people are right-handed. The second is that different countries were using different forms of transportation at the time that formalized rules of the road began to emerge. The way in which the first consideration interacted with the second consideration explains how we drive today. Thus a samurai in Japan, who kept his scabbard on his left side and would draw with his right arm, wanted to be on the left as he passed potential enemies on the road. So Japan today drives on the left. In England, horse-drawn carts were generally piloted by drivers mounted in the seat. The mostly right-handed drivers would “naturally” sit to the right, holding the reins in the left hand and the whip in the right. The driver could better judge oncoming traffic by traveling on the left. So England drives on the left. But in many other countries, including the United States, a driver often walked along the left side of his horse team or rode the left horse in a team (the left-rear horse if there were more than
two), so that he could use his right arm for better control. This meant it was better to stay to the right, so he could judge oncoming traffic and talk to other drivers. The result is that many countries today drive on the right.

  Even when laws are ostensibly the same, norms help explain why traffic can feel so different in different places. Driving on the Italian autostrada for the first time, for example, can be a shock to the uninitiated. Left-lane driving is reserved for passing, and for many drivers in the left lane, their entire trip is one epic overtaking, a process known in Italy as il sorpasso, a phrase freighted with additional meanings in social mobility. Get in the way of someone in the midst of a sorpasso and they will soon drive so close that you can feel, on the back of your neck, the heat of their headlights, which they’re flashing furiously. This is less a matter of aggressiveness than incredulousness at your violation of the standard.

  “The law in most European countries is to drive as far to the right as is practical,” explained Per Garder, a Swedish professor of traffic engineering who now teaches at the University of Maine. “But in America that’s just on paper—the person who comes from behind almost always yields to the person in front, while in Italy it’s the person behind. You are supposed to move away and let them pass. As an American driver it is difficult to remember, especially if you’re going above the speed limit yourself—why shouldn’t you be allowed to be in the passing lane?” In the United States, a rather hazy norm (and a confusing array of laws) says that the left lane is reserved for the fastest traffic, but this is not as rigidly ingrained as it is in Italy. In fact, in the United States one is likely to see the occasional reaction (passive-aggressive braking, refusal to move, etc.) to Italian-style tailgating. Americans, perhaps out of some sense that equality or fairness or individual rights have been violated, seem to take these acts more personally. In Italy, which has a historically weak central government and overall civic culture, the citizenry relies less on the state for articulating concepts like fairness and equality. This, at least, was the theory presented to me in Rome by Giuseppe Cesaro, an official with the Automobile Club d’Italia. “In American movies, they always say, ‘I pay taxes. I have my rights.’ In Italy no one’s going to say this. You pay taxes? Then you are a fool.”