Traffic

by Tom Vanderbilt

In America, a pedestrian is someone who has just parked their car.

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.

When people are waiting, they are bad judges of time, and every half minute seems like five. —Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

There is a huge gulf in legal recrimination between a person who boosts his blood alcohol concentration way over the limit and kills someone45 and a driver who boosts his speedometer way over the limit and kills someone.

One study, conducted in a driving simulator, showed that drivers reacted more quickly when stopped police cars were parked at an angle to oncoming traffic, rather than straight ahead in the direction of traffic. As the two vehicles were essentially equally conspicuous, the reason the angled car was seen sooner had less to do with visibility than in how the drivers interpreted what they saw: a car that was obviously not moving in the direction of traffic.

Los Angeles, like all cities, is essentially a noncooperative network. Its traffic system is filled with streams of people who desire to move how they want, and where they want, when they want, regardless of what everyone else is doing.

One of the curious laws of traffic is that most people, the world over, spend roughly the same amount of time each day getting to where they need to go. Whether the setting is an African village or an American city, the daily round-trip commute clocks in at about 1.1 hours.

Studies have shown that satisfaction with one’s commute begins to drop off at around thirty minutes each way.

You might think that the rise of larger, consolidated stores like Costco or Wal-Mart Supercenters, which offer one-stop shopping, might have actually helped cut down on the amount of shopping trips. But larger stores need to serve more people, which means, in effect, that they’re farther away from more people. (A similar trend has also occurred with schools, which explains some of the decline in children’s walking.)

studies show that the longer a commute is, the more prone it is to variability37—to be longer or shorter than you expect. And some studies show that we are bothered more by changes to our commute time than by the actual time itself.

This raises the question of how much more successful a city Los Angeles could be if it had built all the freeways it never did, if one could magically whisk from downtown to Santa Monica in a few minutes. Then again, how desirable would a place like Beverly Hills be if the freeway that had been planned for it, to “cure” L.A. traffic, was now running through it? Wouldn’t the increased speed just attract even more people? Is traffic failing Los Angeles, or is it a symptom of a thriving Los Angeles?

98% OF U.S. COMMUTERS FAVOR PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION FOR OTHERS —headline in the Onion

One rough rule of thumb for highways is that drivers should not drive for more than a minute without having a bit of curve. But highway curves, most of which can be driven much like any other section, are often not enough to keep a tired driver awake. Which is why engineers, starting in the 1980s, began to turn to roadside rumble strips. The results were striking. After they were installed on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, run-off-road crashes dropped 70 percent in the period studied.

Things are even worse where right turns are permitted on red; for drivers, rights on red may be the only “cultural advantage” of Los Angeles, as Woody Allen joked, but studies have shown that they are a distinct disadvantage for the health of pedestrians.40 The sad fact is that more urban pedestrians are killed while legally crossing in crosswalks than while jaywalking. Granted, the number of people who use the crosswalk is higher, but this does not diminish the point that more pedestrians are killed in New York City while obeying the law than while not.

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.

When there is less respect for the law, there is a lesser cost (or greater gain) for not following it. Less effective governance means that laws are less effective, which means that people are less likely to follow them.

Whatever the case, a 1994 report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concluded that the “overall, net effect of ABS” on crashes—fatal and otherwise—was “close to zero.”85 (The reason why is still rather a mystery, as the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety concluded in 2000: “The poor early experience of cars with antilocks has never been explained.”)

This raises the interesting, if seemingly outlandish, question of why car drivers, virtually alone among users of wheeled transport, do not wear helmets. Yes, cars do provide a nice metal cocoon with inflatable cushions. But in Australia, for example, head injuries among car occupants, according to research by the Federal Office of Road Safety, make up half the country’s traffic-injury costs. Helmets, cheaper and more reliable than side-impact air bags, would reduce injuries and cut fatalities by some 25 percent.95 A crazy idea, perhaps, but so were air bags once.

In most places in the world, there are more suicides than homicides. Globally, more people take their own lives in an average year—roughly a million—than the total murdered and killed in war.112 We always find these sorts of statistics surprising, even if we are simultaneously aware of one of the major reasons for our misconception: Homicides and war receive much more media coverage than suicides, so they seem more prevalent.

As Larry Burns, vice president of R&D and strategic planning at General Motors, put it to me, “Of all the externalities of an auto that I worry about—energy, environment, equality of access, safety, and congestion—the one that I think is toughest to solve is congestion.”