Auto Industry
We drive as we live
No wonder traffic will never improve. We are doomed by our behavior, as a drive in New York with "Traffic" author Tom Vanderbilt reveals.
Tom Vanderbilt is telling me that he got the idea to write “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do” while merging one day from the New Jersey Turnpike to the Pulaski Skyway. Should he tuck into the crowd as soon as the road sign says “Merge Right” and practice a “random act of kindness,” or stay in his lane and dart onto the skyway at the last minute with the bold attitude, “Live free or die”?
Right now we’re in his 2001 Volvo on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, merging onto the Belt Parkway, and I’m giving him a little bit of a hard time for driving as if he’s caught somewhere between the bumper sticker and the New Hampshire state motto. As we approach the intersection, he lowers his speed, checks his side mirror, looks over his shoulder and tentatively accelerates onto the parkway.
“You have to be careful here,” he says. “People come blazing out of the Battery Tunnel with an E-Z Pass and don’t stop for you.”
“I notice you didn’t signal,” I say.
“It’s New York drivers. It’s one thing I’ve observed from living here: They will not slow down. It’s almost like you’re taunting them. I was told in Boston that signaling is revealing your intentions to the enemy. It’s the same here. You’re better off not signaling.”
That’s a fun and smart insight and “Traffic” is full of them. Vanderbilt is a Brooklyn freelancer with a keen skill at delivering fresh perspectives on everyday things — sneakers, public storage spaces, prefab houses — in Wired, Slate and Artforum. His previous book, “Survival City,” is a lively travelogue through American ghost towns — bomb shelters, nuclear waste sites — haunted by Cold War fever. For “Traffic,” he disappeared for three years into the university warrens of road scholars, who, more than 125 years after the advent of the automobile, are legend. “There are people with entire academic careers devoted to off-ramps,” he says.
Vanderbilt emerged from his road trips with the world’s arcane professors of traffic with a narrative humming with vigorous facts. Did you know more people travel on Saturday at 1 p.m. than during typical rush hours? That only 16 percent of daily trips are to work? Where’s everybody going? Given that Americans spend all the money they make, and bury their credit cards in debt to buy more things, “it should come as little surprise,” Vanderbilt writes, “that much of our increase in driving stems from trips to the mall.”
Perhaps most eye-opening is Vanderbilt’s declaration that “the way we drive is responsible for a good part of our traffic problems.” That’s right, it’s not what urban philosophers Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, James Howard Kunstler and, well, my brother and I, in our 1993 book, “Where the Road and the Sky Collide: America Through the Eyes of Its Drivers,” have been saying all along — we are burning in traffic hell for our greedy sins of rampant urban sprawl.
No, what’s gumming up the highways are hideously self-absorbed drivers who weave in and out of lanes — creating a chain reaction of people stepping on the brakes — desperate to get to some utterly inane appointment for which they think they can’t be late. It’s not that America has too many people and too few highways. Nearly 90 percent of our roads are not congested 90 percent of the time. Look at it this way: If one-fifth of solo drivers hitched a ride with neighbors or friends to the business park or mall, we’d be sailing along Happy Highway every day.
The tall and slender Vanderbilt, a rather soft-spoken scholar himself, doesn’t resort to loud adverbs to make his points about congestion. In his book, he gives way to traffic behaviorist Alan Pisarski, who blames affluence for cities jammed with narcissists in BMWs. Congestion, Pisarski says, is “people with the economic means to act on their social and economic interests getting in the way of other people with the means to act on theirs.”
By no means is Vanderbilt’s book dry or boring. It’s no mean feat to translate academic interviews and papers into prose that skates across the page. And Vanderbilt can rev up the tone when he wants to: “The problem is that if everyone tries to do what they think is the best thing for themselves, the actual travel time for all drivers goes up!”
To see some of Vanderbilt’s ideas in action, and glimpse what traffic says about human “lines of desire,” his nice phrase, I had the terribly original idea to go for a drive. Which is why we’re weathering the late afternoon heat in his Volvo, motoring to Coney Island.
Cruising along the beltway’s middle lane at a civil 50 mph, the speed limit, a Nissan Pathfinder speeds by us in the left lane, nearly drives up the back of a Volkswagen Golf, cuts less than a foot in front of us and straddles two lanes. Beneath Vanderbilt’s Gary Cooper exterior, I see, stew a few driving resentments.
“I don’t know what this person is doing using two lanes at once,” he says. “I’ve always had a dislike of SUVs and now I have even more of one. When it comes to traffic flow — harmony and the highway — they take longer to go through intersections. And because of their size, they pose so many dangers to other drivers. That begs the question, ‘What’s the legal liability for near crashes?’ What’s the ethical burden of driving at 85 mph? To be honest, I could care less about what happens to the person choosing to do that. But he’s putting every other person on the road at a risk. How do we charge for that as a society?”
Death on the highway is the most repressed nightmare in American life. The number of people killed on our roads is like Sept. 11 happening 13 times every year. We seldom discuss the carnage because we don’t dare puncture the illusion of safety.
In “Traffic,” Vanderbilt puts the fear in us by pulling together neurological studies that suggest our brains lack the power to process all the things happening on the road. We see what we expect to see, like a “Yield” sign on a familiar street. Replace it with a “Stop” sign and we’ll drive right through it. Motorcycle riders best understand “inattention blindness,” as they are nearly drilled daily by drivers who only “see” cars. Give Frappuccinos and iPhones to drivers and you have emergency rooms working nonstop.
In the Volvo, Vanderbilt puts it simply. “If we have trouble with decision-making in other areas of life, how can that not be a problem on the road, where we face numerous decisions every mile, coming at speeds we’re not used to dealing with?”
I tell him I don’t entirely accept the futility of neurological studies. After all, my brother and I, in our other book, “Zen Driving,” argue that with practice we can learn to drive without preconceptions, as if every moment on the road is a discrete frame in a film, allowing us to be mindful and humble, aware and much safer drivers.
“Yeah,” Vanderbilt says. I’m not sure, though, he’s buying the Zen line. Besides, he’s lost. “You would like to go to Coney Island, right? I’m sorry, we overshot it and we’re actually in Brighton Beach.”
We pull to the curb near a dead end and he punches letters into a portable GPS monitor on his dashboard. “All I need to do is type in ‘Neptune Avenue.’ All the streets here have funny nautical names. It says we’re two minutes away. That’s the danger with these things — you lose your own sense of direction. Hmmm, why is it recommending we go this way? Oh, well.” We cut across a cul-de-sac that says “Do Not Enter,” make a sharp left turn and maneuver down lanes of brick row houses.
I remind Vanderbilt of a fact from “Traffic” that drivers on unfamiliar roads are 25 percent less efficient than they should be, and total mileage driven could be cut by 2 percent if they were shown the best routes. Although the GPS in this case doesn’t seem to be helping.
“True,” he says. “And being lost obviously corrupts your driving and makes you more stressful.”
“I know it’s hard to talk and drive at the same time,” I say, trying to make him feel comfortable.
“The worry is it makes my driving worse. Plus I worry I’m giving you meandering quotes.”
“Not at all,” I say.
“Oh, I think I just went through a red light. Sorry about that. Maybe you shouldn’t put that in the story,” he says. We both laugh.
Finally we find a parking space and walk along the famous Coney Island boardwalk, past Nathan’s, the giant yellow hot dog palace, and the old wooden Cyclone roller coaster. I’ve never been here and am duly charmed by the amusement park’s faded glory, the sense that time here stopped in the 1930s. Except for all the sunbathers with iPods.
Vanderbilt and I talk about how people, cloaked in the anonymity of their cars, exhibit the worst human traits. Like readers hiding behind pseudonyms online, self-importance inflates through the roof, social convention vanishes, and naked aggression rules. Vanderbilt confirms that recent studies show that drivers are fueled by ancient parts of the brain where instructions to hunt and kill reside. At the same time, it’s true that in some metropolitan areas, where road architects have managed to keeps speeds under 20 mph, and some drivers, notably in convertibles, make eye contact with other drivers and pedestrians, the streets can be home to a modicum of decorum.
One of those areas, however, doesn’t appear to be Brooklyn. As we leave the beach in the Volvo, we approach a stoplight on a narrow street. Before we reach the intersection, we have to wait for a Geo Metro, which is backing into a parallel parking space. Just then a Lincoln Town Car behind us blares the horn. “Why are you honking?” a bemused Vanderbilt asks aloud. “Can you not see the red light right here? Or see this guy trying to park? What am I going to do, move 10 feet?”
Gabbing through patches of stop-and-go traffic on the beltway, we make it back to Vanderbilt’s Brooklyn apartment in about 25 minutes, having been cut off by a black Corvette and honked at only three times for going the speed limit. We park and walk to a bar, where we sit outside in the warm twilight. I tell him that in the 286 pages of “Traffic,” I’m surprised he mentions the environmental impact of cars only in a couple of sentences near the end.
“Didn’t you think the nasty thing that traffic is doing to our environment was important to include?” I ask.
“I didn’t get into that because I felt it’s been treated well elsewhere,” he says. “Undoubtedly, there could be a million things to talk about. Emissions. The flood implications of land being given to parking. Wildlife not breeding because roads fragment their habitats. All that would require a number of pages, and I was asked to turn the book in at a certain length. But is anyone really disputing the environmental impact at this point? Do I even have to go there?” He pauses. “I can tell by the look on your face that I’m going to have to write an afterword to the paperback.”
I laugh. I say it’s important but I’m not sure it will make a difference to remind people of the environmental ravages of driving. If there’s a single theme that emerges from his book, it’s the pretty depressing one that people don’t change.
By the end, he’s expertly shown that despite being told for years that we can avoid traffic by planning our time better, that we can reduce congestion by not swapping lanes every 200 yards, and that we can stop killing our neighbors by not downing two martinis before commuting home, we still drive according to our lines of desire.
“Do you think you emerged from your research as a pessimist about human nature?” I ask.
“I guess so,” Vanderbilt says. “Car companies had their problems with trying to skimp on safety in the ’50s and ’60s. But since then cars have gotten physically safer every year. But our behavior hasn’t caught up. We are driving more and killing tens of thousands of people a year.”
A woman pushes a stroller down the sidewalk in front of us. Guys on bikes pedal by. A Prius glides down the street. “Now I hear Chrysler wants to put Internet access in cars,” Vanderbilt says. “We never seem to learn.”
Kevin Berger is the former features editor at Salon. More Kevin Berger.
Films in Progress: Detropia
Oscar-nominated directors are seeking help to release their new film independently. Check out this exclusive clip
No city has experienced the highs and lows of capitalism like Detroit. So what does it mean to the country when the most epic of epicenters of American industrial might falls to its knees? And can it rise again? “Detropia” is a haunting portrait of a city on the brink of collapse, told by a chorus of weary but optimistic citizens who have no plans to join the hundreds of thousands who have already defected for easier corners of the country. “Detropia,” which won the editing award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, will make its way into movie theaters this fall … with your help. Dissatisfied with the limitations of traditional distributors, award-winning filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady have launched their first-ever Kickstarter campaign to raise distribution funds to take the film far and wide in the fall.
Continue Reading CloseMitt Romney driving uphill in Michigan
Another month of great numbers for car-makers exposes Romney's failed message on interventionism
A Chrysler dealership in San Jose, Calif. (Credit: AP/Paul Sakuma) Dueling pundits, start your engines: The auto industry kicked off 2012 with a turbo-powered roar, and Democrats won’t wait long to make hay out of the impressive numbers. The question of the day: How will the GOP respond to one of the most successful displays of forceful government intervention in the economy the U.S. has witnessed in decades?
The numbers are hard to argue with: After the major automakers released their January sales figures, Autodata Corp. estimated cars raced out of lots at an annualized sales rate of 14.18 million vehicles for 2012. That’s the best month of sales — excluding August 2009′s Cash-for-Clunkers — since April 2008. GDP forecasters are likely rejiggering their first-quarter estimates even now.
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Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21. More Andrew Leonard.
How Ford built the ultimate lemon
A look at the design and promotion that went into the company's biggest flop: the Edsel
The purpose of this piece is less about the actual history of the Edsel and more about the design and promotion of the car. I’ve always thought that it was one of the most outrageous looking automobiles to ever roll off an assembly line, and the name “Edsel” (Henry Ford’s son) hardly does a lyrical dance off one’s lips… What also intrigues me is how much money and effort was spent on the beast and how terribly wrong everything seemed to go. To help put things in perspective, I’ve included a good postmortem analysis from a 1959 article in Business Week below.
“Revenge of the Electric Car”: Why the automakers went green
Former gadfly Chris Paine goes inside the car industry for the cutthroat drama of "Revenge of the Electric Car"
Never let it be said that activist documentaries don’t make a difference, even if the difference they make is never predictable. Filmmaker Chris Paine began as a gadfly outsider to the auto industry, capturing a distinctive strain of eco-grass-roots rage in his 2006 “Who Killed the Electric Car?,” which explored the short and unhappy life of the EV1, General Motors’ late-’90s all-electric vehicle. By 2004, G.M. had reclaimed and destroyed virtually all the EV1′s it had manufactured — they were leased to consumers, rather than sold — and the plug-in automobile, a long-cherished dream of environmentalists, seemed permanently entombed under parking lots full of Hummers and Escalades.
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Toyota Venza’s anti-hipster commercials
After years of trying to sell us cars to make us feel younger, advertisers are trying to turn old into the new cool
Who wants to be a cool kid? Car commercials typically come in two types: those marketed to “family adults” and those marketed to “mid-life crisis adults.” The first type of commercial will usually show a mother and father smoothly careening down a country road in their SUV, their 2.5 kids placid and safe in the backseat. Maybe they end up on a beach and take out their surfboards? Or at home, climbing out of their four-door Sedan. And the tagline will be something along the lines of “Life is full of surprises. Your car shouldn’t be one of them.”
Continue Reading CloseDrew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.
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