Traffic once seemed to me a natural phenomenon—like the wind or the rain. Traffic simply was; it existed as a thing apart, a force we had no control over.
Now I don’t mean the traffic that comes of accidents or construction—I mean the traffic that emerges out of nothing, out of the vehicles and the road they drive on. I mean the kind of traffic that appears for a stretch of the road only to vanish a few minutes or miles later. Where did it come from?
This is how I used to think before I read Tom Vanderbilt’s brilliant and aptly titled book Traffic. Aptly titled for obvious reasons and brilliant because it turned a critical eye on something I thought deserved no such intensity of focus. Thinking about traffic this way—before I read the book!—seemed a loony thing to do.
Traffic, I learned, is—obviously, I’m sure, to many—not just an inevitable part of transit. Some traffic happens because we don’t make good use of the road.
Make good use of the road?
What?
My favorite example is the merge. Since I started regularly commuting by car a few years ago, I’ve thought about this A LOT.
The merge—where a lane ends and the vehicles in it must make their way over to the adjacent lane—is probably the most dreaded feature of American driving.
I don’t know why this is, but I know it’s true. We fear the merge so much that we rarely make it to the actual merge. The ideal is that every vehicle in the ending lane travels the full possible length of the lane and then zippers with the other cars.
This never happens. (In America, anyway.)
Instead, at the first sign of a pending merge—usually the dreaded “lane ends” sign—drivers begin to freak out. Some take the first possible opportunity to get out of the lane, as though the stretch of remaining asphalt were about to vanish.
Others flip their turn signals on and sally onward, looking for a slower vehicle (box trucks are good!) to overtake and then turn in front of, as a predator with prey.
Others do the crazy thing—they use the road. They ignore the desperate psychological need to merge and drive as far as they can before the lane ends.
Taylor Coe 