Norms may be cultural, but traffic can also create its own culture. Consider the case of jaywalking in New York City and Copenhagen. In both places, jaywalking, or crossing against the light, is technically prohibited. In both places, people have been ticketed for doing it. But the visitor to either city today will witness a shocking study in contrast. In New York City, where the term jaywalking was popularized, originally referring to those hapless bumpkins, or country “jays,” who came to the city with little notion of how to perambulate properly in big-city traffic, waiting for the signal is now the sign of a novice from the sticks. By contrast, the average Copenhagen resident seems to have a biological aversion to crossing against the light. Early on a freezing Sunday morning in January, not a car in sight, and they’ll refuse to jaywalk—this in a city with the largest anarchist commune in the world! They’ll stop, draw in a breath, perhaps tilt their head a bit skyward to catch a snowflake. They’ll gaze at shop windows, or look lost in thought. Then the signal will change, and they’ll move on, almost reluctantly.
It is tempting to chalk up the differences purely to culture. In New York City, a melting pot of clashing traditions and a hotbed of ruthless and obnoxious individualism, jaywalking is a way to distinguish yourself from the crowd and get ahead, a test of urban moxie. “Pedestrians look at cars, not lights,” Michael King, a traffic engineer in New York City, told me. Jaywalking also helps relieve overcrowded clusters at intersections. In Copenhagen, which historically has had a more homogenous, consensus-seeking population, jaywalking is an act of bad taste, an unnecessary departure from the harmony that sustains communities. Waiting for the light to change, like waiting for spring, seems a test of the stoic and wintry Scandinavian soul. In the 1930s, the Danish-Norwegian novelist Aksel Sandemose famously described a set of “laws” (called the Jantelagen) inspired by the small Danish town in which he was raised. They all basically had the same theme: Do not think you are better than anyone else. The “Jante laws” are a still popular shorthand toward explaining the relative social cohesion and egalitarian nature of Scandinavian societies, and it’s not hard to imagine them applied to traffic. Jaywalking, like speeding or excessive lane changing (which one rarely sees on Danish roads), is just a form of ostentatious narcissism that disrupts communal village life.
When I offered these theories to the celebrated urban planner Jan Gehl as we sat in his office in Copenhagen, he brushed them aside and countered with a rival theory: “I think the whole philosophy of the city means you have good-quality sidewalks and frequent intersections. You know you only have to wait for a short while and then it gets green.” By contrast, his firm had recently completed a study of London. “We found it was completely complicated to get across any street. We found that only twenty-five percent of the people actually did what the traffic planners suggested to do,” he said. The more you make things difficult for pedestrians, Gehl argued, the more you downgrade their status in the traffic system, “the more they start to take the law into their own hands.” I thought back to New York City, where the lights on Fifth Avenue seem purposely timed so that walkers have to pause at every intersection. Was it New York’s traffic system, and not New Yorkers themselves, that made the city the jaywalking capital of the United States?
There is an iron law in traffic engineering: The longer pedestrians have to wait for a signal to cross, the more likely they are to cross against the signal. The jaywalking tipping point seems to be about thirty seconds (the same time, it turns out, after which cars waiting to make a left turn against traffic begin to accept shorter, more dangerous gaps). The idea that waiting time might be the real explanation behind jaywalking was brought home to me one afternoon in London as I looked at brightly colored computer maps of pedestrian crossings with Jake Desyllas, an urban planner who heads Intelligent Space. On certain streets in London, he pointed out, the proportion of people who crossed only during the “green man” would be 75 percent, but on a neighboring street, the number would be drastically lower. It was not that the culture of people waiting to cross the street changed as they walked one block, but rather that one street-crossing design paid more heed to pedestrians than the other. Not surprisingly, the places where it took pedestrians longer to get across had more informal crossings. At one of the worst spots in London, the crossing to the Angel tube station across the A1 Street in Islington, Desyllas found that pedestrians who make it to the center island can wait as long as sixty-two seconds for a “Walk” signal. The city is virtually compelling pedestrians to jaywalk.
As if traffic were not complicated enough, there is the additional problem that it regularly throws together people with different norms. Because each is convinced they are right—and traffic laws often disprove neither—they’re that much more primed to “go off” at the other’s perceived mis-deeds (e.g., late merging, left-lane tailgating). Traffic also tosses together those with local knowledge and lesser-educated outside users, the pros with the amateurs. Any time-starved city dweller who has been stuck walking behind a group of slow-moving tourists has come across this phenomenon; proposals have been made for pedestrian “express lanes” in New York’s Times Square or London’s Oxford Street for this reason. Or take the local driver trapped behind someone looking for an unfamiliar address. The banal boulevard that one driver has seen a million times and wants to hurry through will be a fascinating spectacle for another driver, worthy of slow appreciation. In Florida, two bumper stickers embody this struggle: I BRAKE FOR BEACHES and SOME OF US AREN’T ON VACATION.
What’s striking is how quickly the local norms can be picked up. Years of driver training or habit can be washed away like dirt from a windshield. David Shinar, an expert in the psychology of traffic at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University, argues this point: “If you take an Israeli driver and transplant him to Savannah, Georgia, I guarantee that within two months he will be driving like the people there, like everyone around him. And if you transport someone from the American Midwest to Tel Aviv, within days he will be driving like an Israeli—because if he doesn’t, he’ll get nowhere.” And so, like the visitor to England who begins to appreciate lukewarm beer, astute drivers will echo local inflections like the “Pittsburgh left,” that act of driving practiced primarily in the Steel City (but also Beijing) in which the change of a traffic light to green is an “unofficial” signal for a left-turning driver to quickly bolt across the oncoming traffic. New arrivals to Los Angeles soon become versed in the “California roll,” a.k.a. the “sushi stop,” which involves never quite coming to a complete halt at a stop sign.
Traffic is like a language. It generally works best if everyone knows and obeys the rules of grammar, though slang can be brutally effective. If you’re absolutely unfamiliar with it, it will seem confusing, chaotic, and fast. Learn a few words, and patterns begin to emerge. Become more fluent, and suddenly it all begins to make sense. Rome presents an interesting example here. As I mentioned in the Prologue, Rome has been grappling with traffic problems since it became Rome. As Caesar tried to ban carts, so did Mussolini, the “Twentieth-Century Caesar,” try to regulate the city to his whims. Il Duce, as one story goes, grew so impatient with the chaos on the Via Corso that he attempted, in vain, to force pedestrians to walk in only one direction on each side of the street. Appropriately for a city whose history is steeped in mythology, the Roman driver has assumed an almost mythological status.
Roman driving is distinguished by space and pace. The narrowness of most streets, coupled with the quick acceleration of small, manually shifted cars, enhances the feeling of speed. Drivers focus on entering the smallest gaps possible. As Cesaro, the official with the Automobile Club d’Italia, explained one afternoon in his office on the Via Nazionale, Roman traffic behavior is “simply a need—there are so many cars on the tight road. We are always side by side. Sometimes we start talking to each other. The traffic lights change two or three times. Sometimes we become friends.” Stuck at those lights, the car driver will notice a steady stream of scoote
rs slowly filtering to the front of the queue, like the grains in a snow globe settling on the bottom. “They should follow rules like cars,” said Paolo Borgogne, also of the ACI, of Rome’s legions of scooters, “but for some reason it is believed they don’t need to…. Traffic lights, for instance, they consider furniture on the corner of the road.” But things are changing: Whereas for years scooter drivers required no license, a patentino, or “small driver’s license,” is now mandatory.
As with Delhi, however, it’s not difficult to imagine that Roman traffic jams would be worse if scooters (which make up one-fifth of the traffic) always acted like cars. And the legendarily “crazy” Roman traffic might just be a matter of interpretation. Max Hall, a physics teacher in Massachusetts who often rides his collection of classic Vespas and Lambrettas in Rome, says that he finds it safer to ride in Rome than in Boston. Not only are American drivers unfamiliar with scooters, he maintains, but they resent being passed by them: “In Rome car and truck drivers ‘know’ they are expected not to make sudden moves in traffic for fear of surprising, and hurting, two-wheeler drivers. And two-wheeler drivers drive, by and large, expecting not to be cut off.” In this regard, Rome is safer than other Italian cities where fewer riders wear helmets and studies have shown that scooters are much more likely to have collisions with cars. Reaching for the language of physics, Hall says, “The poetic and beautiful result is that four-wheelers behave like fixed objects, by moving very little relative to each other, even at significant speeds, while two-wheeler traffic moves ‘through’ the relatively static field of larger vehicles.”
Thinking that the key to truly understanding Roman traffic might lie in physics, one afternoon I went to visit Andrea De Martino, a physicist with the Laboratory of Complex Systems at the University of Rome. In his office at La Sapienza, he drew diagrams on the chalkboard and spoke of “network optimalization” and “resource competition.” Then he talked about Rome. “My girlfriend is not from Rome, she’s not Italian,” he said. “She tried to understand the logic behind the fact that a car can just cross the road even if it sees you coming. There is no logic.” He contrasted this to driving in Germany, which he’d found to be “marvelous.” This was not the first time I’d heard a Roman praise driving in some other, more “orderly,” country. I asked him: If everyone likes it so much, why don’t they drive that way here? He said: “I like the German system—in Germany.”
One could drive like a Roman in Frankfurt, or drive like a Frankfurter in Rome, only one might not do so well in either situation. But why is that? Where do these norms come from? The simplest answer may be that Romans drive the way they do because other Romans do.
This idea was expressed in a series of experiments by the psychologist Robert Cialdini. In one study, handbills were placed on the windshields of cars in a parking garage; the garage was sometimes clean and sometimes filled with litter. In various trials, a nearby “confederate” either littered or simply walked through the garage. They did this when the garage was filled with litter and when it was clean. The researchers found that the subjects, upon arriving at their cars, were less likely to litter when the garage was clean. They also found that subjects were more likely to litter when they observed someone else littering, but only if the garage was already dirty.
What was going on? Cialdini argues there are two different norms at work: an “injunctive norm,” or the idea of what people should do (the “ought” norm), and a “descriptive norm,” or what people actually do (the “is” norm). While injunctive norms can have an impact, it was the descriptive norm that was clearly guiding behavior here: People littered if it seemed like most other people did. If only one person was seen littering in a clean garage, people were less likely to litter—perhaps because the other’s act was so clearly violating the injunctive norm. This is why so many public-service advertising campaigns fall on deaf ears, Cialdini and others have suggested. An advertisement about the many billions of dollars lost to tax cheating draws attention to the problem, but it also whispers: Look how many other people are doing it (and getting away with it). Who is violating a norm is also important: Studies of pedestrians have found that walkers are more likely to cross against the light when a “high-status” (i.e., well-dressed) person first does so; they’re less likely to cross when that same person doesn’t. “Low-status” violators prompt less imitative behavior either way.
Traffic is filled with injunctive norms, telling drivers what to do and what not to do. But the descriptive norm is often saying something else—and saying it louder. The most common example is the speed limit. The law on many U.S. highways is 65 miles per hour, but a norm has gradually emerged that says anything up to 10 miles per hour above that is legal fair game. Raise the speed limit, and the norm tends to shift; driving the speed limit starts to seem hazardous.
Some norms seem to hold more strongly than others. Leonard Evans, a trained physicist and traffic-safety researcher who worked for General Motors for more than thirty years, gives an example: “It’s two a.m., some guy’s just been speeding, to save time. He comes to this intersection. There’s no traffic in sight anywhere. He sits stationary for thirty seconds. Objectively speaking, he is causing far more risk by his exceeding the speed limit than he would be if he stopped at the red light, looked this way and that way, and just went through it. But we have a robust social norm in the U.S. You just do not consciously and casually drive through a completely red light. Unfortunately, we don’t have a robust norm against not going fast after it’s turned green.” Both acts are technically against the law, each bear similar penalties, but one act seems more illegal than the other. Perhaps in speeding the driver feels as if he’s in control, while going through a red light, even carefully, puts one at the mercy of others. He may also speed because most other people do (whereas if everyone decided to cross through red lights, anarchy would ensue).
Most traffic laws around the world are remarkably similar. Many places have relatively similar roads and traffic markings. But the norms of each place are subtly different, and norms are powerful, curious things. Laws do not dictate how people should queue up in the United Kingdom or China—nor should they, most would argue—but try queuing up in either place and you will notice a striking difference. In the United Kingdom, queues are famously orderly, but in China, they often exist more in theory than reality—queue jumping, along with jaywalking, was another behavior targeted by the Chinese government for extinction before the 2008 Olympics.
Similarly, economists have long been puzzled by the fact that, in most places, restaurant patrons tip their server after they have already been served—which may boost the incentive for the server to give good service but hardly increases the incentive for the patron to tip well. Mysterious, too, is that patrons tip even in the face of further erosion of these incentives—if their service was less than desirable or if they don’t plan to return to the same restaurant. Studies have shown the link between tip and service quality to be slight. People seem to tip because it’s seen as the right thing to do, or because they don’t want it known that they’ve not done the right thing. There’s no law that says that patrons have to tip; they simply follow the norm.
In traffic, norms represent some kind of subtle dance with the law. Either the norms and laws move in time or one partner is out of step. In Florence, observes the writer Beppe Severigni, the locals have a phrase, rosso pieno, or “full red,” for a traffic signal. This implies that there are other reds that are less “full.” These distinctions are not noted by law, but they help explain actual behavior. Yet where do these norms come from? How do they adhere to or depart from the law? It seems that the most significant norm of all, as the legal scholar Amir Licht has noted, is the “deeper, more general norm of obeying the law.” When you step off a curb because you have the “Walk” light or drive through a green light expecting not to be hit by another driver, it is not the law per se that protects you but other drivers’ willingness to follow the law. Laws explain what we
ought to do; norms explain what we actually do. In that gap dwells a key to understanding why traffic behaves the way it does in different places.
Danger: Corruption Ahead—the Secret Indicator of Crazy Traffic
In 1951, some 852 people were killed on the roads in China. In the United States in that year, 35,309 people were killed in traffic. In 1999, traffic fatalities in China had risen to nearly 84,000. The U.S. figure, meanwhile, was 41,508. The population of both countries had almost doubled in that time. Why did fatalities rise so much higher in China than in the United States?
The answer lies in the number of vehicles in each country. In 1951, there were about 60,000 motor vehicles in China, while in the United States, there were roughly 49 million. By 1999, when China had 50 million vehicles, the United States had over 200 million—four times as many. And yet twice as many people were killed on Chinese roads than American ones. How could the country with so many fewer vehicles have so many more deaths?
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