Chapter One
Why I Became a Late Merger
(and Why You Should Too)
Why does the other lane always seem to be moving faster?
It is a question you have no doubt asked yourself while crawling down some
choked highway, watching with mounting frustration as the adjacent cars glide
ahead. You drum the wheel with your fingers. You change the radio station. You
fixate on one car as a benchmark of your own lack of progress. You try to figure
out what that weird button next to the rearwindow
defroster actually does.
I used to think this was just part of the natural randomness of the highway.
Sometimes fate would steer me into the faster lane, sometimes it would
relinquish me to the slow lane.
That was until recently, when I had an experience that made me rethink my
traditionally passive outlook on the road, and upset the careful set of
assumptions that had always guided my behavior in traffic.
I made a major lifestyle change. I became a late merger.
Chances are, at some point you have found yourself driving along the highway
when a sign announces that the left lane, in which you are traveling, will close
one mile ahead, and that you must merge right.
You notice an opening in the right lane and quickly move over. You breathe a
sigh, happy to be safely ensconced in the Lane That Will Not End. Then, as the
lane creeps to a slow halt, you notice with rising indignation that cars in the
lane you have vacated are continuing to speed ahead, out of sight. You quietly
seethe and contemplate returning to the much faster left lane-if only you could
work an opening. You grimly accept your condition.
One day, not long ago, I had an epiphany on a New Jersey highway. I was having a
typical white-knuckle drive among the scenic oil-storage depots and
chemical-processing plants of northern Jersey when suddenly, on the approach to
the Pulaski Skyway, the sign loomed: LANE ENDS ONE MILE. MERGE RIGHT.
Seized by some rash impulse, I avoided the instinctual tickle at the back of my
brain telling me to get in the already crowded right lane. Just do what the sign
says, that voice usually counsels. Instead, I listened to another, more
insistent voice: Don’t be a sucker. You can do better. I plowed purposefully
ahead, oblivious to the hostile stares of other drivers. From the corner of my
eye I could see my wife cringing. After passing dozens of cars, I made it to the
bottleneck point, where, filled with newfound swagger, I took my rightful turn
in the small alternating “zipper” merge that had formed. I merged, and it was
clear asphalt ahead. My heart was beating faster. My wife covered her face with
her hands.
In the days after, a creeping guilt and confusion took hold. Was I wrong to have
done this? Or had I been doing it wrong all my life? Looking for an answer, I
posted an anonymous inquiry on Ask MetaFilter, a Web site one can visit to ask
random questions and tap into the “hive mind” of an anonymous audience of
overeducated and overopinionated geeks. Why should one lane move faster than the
other, I wanted to know, and why are people rewarded for merging at the last
possible moment? And was my new lifestyle, that of the late merger, somehow
deviant?
I was startled by the torrent of responses, and how quickly they came. What
struck me most was the passion and conviction with which people argued their
various cases-and the fact that while many people seemed to think I was wrong,
almost as many seemed to think I was right. Rather than easy consensus, I had
stumbled into a gaping divide of irreconcilable
belief.
The first camp-let us name it after the bumper sticker that says practice
random acts of kindness-viewed early mergers as virtuous souls doing the right
thing and late mergers as arrogant louts. “Unfortunately, people suck,” wrote
one Random Acts poster. “They’ll try whatever they can to pass you, to better
enjoy the traffic jam from a few car lengths ahead of you…. People who feel
that they have more pressing concerns and are generally more important than you
will keep going, and some weak-spined schmuck will let them in further down,
slowing your progress even more. This sucks; I’m afraid it’s the way of the
world.”
Another camp, the minority camp-let’s call them Live Free or Die, after the
license-plate motto of the state of New Hampshire-argued that the late mergers
were quite rationally utilizing the highway’s maximum capacity, thus making life
better for everyone. In their view, the other group’s attempts toward politeness
and fairness were actually detrimental to all.
It got more complicated. Some argued that late merges caused more accidents.
Some said the system worked much better in Germany, and hinted that my dilemma
perhaps revealed some national failing in the American character. Some said they
were afraid of not being “let in” at the last moment; some said they would
actively try to block someone from merging, the way truckers often do. So what
was going on here? Are we not all driving the same road, did we not all pass the
same driving tests? What was puzzling was not just the variety of responses but
the sense of moral righteousness each person attributed to his or her highway
behavior, and the vitriol each person reserved for those holding the opposite
view. For the most part, people were not citing traffic laws or actual evidence
but their own personal sense of what was right.
I even found someone claiming to have had a conversion experience exactly the
opposite of mine. “Until very recently, I was a ‘late merger,'” wrote the
author, an executive with a software company, in a business magazine. Why had he
become a born-again early merger? “Because I came to realize that traffic flowed
faster the sooner people merged.” He used this as a metaphor for successful team
building in corporate America, in which “late mergers” were those who
consistently put their own opinions and motives above the greater company.
“Early mergers,” he wrote, could help push companies to their “maximum communal
speed.” But did traffic flow faster when people merged sooner? Or did it just
seem more noble to think that it did?
* * *
You may suspect that getting people to merge in a timely fashion, and without
killing one another, is less of a traffic problem and more of a human problem.
The road, more than simply a system of regulations and designs, is a place where
many millions of us, with only loose parameters for how to behave, are thrown
together daily in a kind of massive petri dish in which all kinds of uncharted,
little-understood dynamics are at work. There is no other place where so many
people from different walks of life-different ages, races, classes, religions,
genders, political preferences, lifestyle choices, levels of psychological
stability-mingle so freely.
What do we really know about how it all works? Why do we act the way we do on
the road, and what might that say about us? Are certain people predisposed to
drive certain ways? Do women behave differently than men? And if, as
conventional wisdom has it, drivers have become progressively less civil over
the past several decades, why is that so? Is the road a microcosm of society, or
its own place with its own set of rules? I have a friend, an otherwise timorous
Latin teacher, who once told me how, in a modest Toyota Corolla, he had
defiantly “stuck it” to the driver of an eighteen-wheeler who he felt was
hogging the road. Some mysterious force had turned this gentle suburban scholar
into the Travis Bickle of the turnpike. (Are you tailgatin’ me?) Was it traffic,
or had the beast always been lurking within?
The more you think about it-or, rather, the more time you spend in traffic with
time to think about it-the more these sorts of puzzling questions swim to the
surface. Why can one sit in traffic jams that seem to have no source? Why does a
ten-minute “incident” create one hundred minutes of gridlock? Do people really
take longer to vacate a parking spot when someone else is waiting, or does it
just seem so? Do the car-pool lanes on highways help fight congestion or cause
more of it? Just how dangerous are large trucks? How does what we drive, where
we drive, and with whom we drive affect the way we drive? Why do so many New
Yorkers jaywalk, while hardly anyone in Copenhagen does? Is New Delhi’s traffic
as chaotic as it seems, or does a beautiful order lurk beneath the frenzied
surface?
Like me, you may have wondered: What could traffic tell us, if someone would
just stop to listen?
The first thing you hear is the word itself. Traffic. What did you think of when
you read that word? In all likelihood you pictured a crowded highway, filled
with people obstructing your progress. It was not a pleasant thought. This is
interesting, because for most of its long life the word traffic has had rather
positive connotations. It originally referred (and still does) to trade and the
movement of goods. That meaning slowly expanded to include the people engaging
in that trade and the dealings among people themselves-Shakespeare’s prologue
to Romeo and Juliet describes the “traffic of our stage.” It then came to
signify the movement itself, as in the “traffic on this road.” At some point,
people and things became interchangeable. The movement of goods and people were
intertwined in a single enterprise; after all, if one was going somewhere, it
was most likely in pursuit of commerce. This is still true today, as most
traffic problems occur during the times we are all going to work, but we seem
less likely to think of traffic in terms of motion and mobility, as a great
river of opportunity, than as something that makes our lives miserable.
Now, like then, we think of traffic as an abstraction, a grouping of things
rather than a collection of individuals. We talk about “beating the traffic” or
“getting stuck in traffic,” but we never talk-in polite company, at
least-about “beating people” or “getting stuck in people.” The news lumps
together “traffic and weather” as if they were both passive forces largely
outside our control, even though whenever we complain about it, we do so because
we’re part of the traffic. (To be fair, I suppose we are now part of the weather
as well, thanks to the atmospheric emissions of that same driving.) We say there
is “too much traffic” without exactly knowing what we mean. Are we saying there
are too many people? Or that there are not enough roads for the people who are
there? Or that there is too much affluence, which has enabled too many people to
own cars?
One routinely hears of “traffic problems.” But what is a traffic problem? To a
traffic engineer, a “traffic problem” might mean that a street is running below
capacity. For a parent living on that street, the “traffic problem” could be too
many cars, or cars going too fast. For the store owner on that same street, a
“traffic problem” might mean there is not enough traffic. Blaise Pascal, the
renowned seventeenth-century French scientist and philosopher, had perhaps the
only foolproof remedy for traffic: Stay home. “I have discovered that all the
unhappiness of men arises from one single fact,” he wrote. “That they cannot
stay quietly in their own chamber.” Pascal, as it happens, is credited with
inventing history’s first urban bus service. He died a mere five months later.
Was Parisian traffic his undoing?
Whatever “traffic problem” means to you, it may give you some comfort to know
that traffic problems of all variety are as old as traffic itself. Ever since
humans began to propel themselves artificially, society has struggled to catch
up with the implications of mobility, to sort out technical and social responses
to the new demands.
Visitors to the ruins of Pompeii, for example, will see rutted streets marked by
the tracks of chariot wheels. But many are wide enough for only one set of
wheels. The tourist wonders: Was it a one-way street? Did a lowly commoner have
to reverse himself out of the way when a member of the imperial legions came
trotting along in the other direction? If two chariots arrived at an
intersection simultaneously, who went first? These questions were neglected for
years, but recent work by the American traffic archaeologist Eric Poehler has
provided some answers.
By studying the wear patterns on curbstones at corners, as well as the stepping
stones set up for pedestrians to cross the “rutways,” Poehler was able to
discern not just the direction of traffic but the direction of turns onto
two-way streets at intersections. It seems, based on the “directionally
diagnostic wear patterns” on the curbstones, that Pompeii drivers drove on the
right side of the street (part of a larger cultural preference for righthanded
activities), used primarily a system of one-way streets, and were banned from
driving on certain streets altogether. There seemed to be no traffic signs or
street signs. It may please the reader to know, however, that Pompeii did suffer
from its share of road construction and detours (as when the building of baths
forced the reversal of the Vico di Mercurio).
In ancient Rome, the chariot traffic grew so intense that Caesar, the
self-proclaimed curator viarum, or “director of the great roads,” declared a
daytime ban on carts and chariots, “except to transport construction materials
for the temples of the gods or for other great public works or to take away
demolition materials.” Carts could enter the city only after three p.m. And yet,
as one so often finds in the world of traffic, there is very rarely an action
without an equal and opposite reaction. By making it easier for the average
Roman to move around during the day, Caesar made it harder for them to sleep at
night. The poet Juvenal, sounding like a second-century version of a
contemporary Roman complaining about scooter traffic, lamented, “Only if one has
a lot of money can one sleep in Rome. The source of the problem lies in the
carts passing through the bottlenecks of the curved streets, and the flocks that
stop and make so much noise they would prevent … even a devil-fish from
sleeping.”
By the time we get to medieval England, we can see that traffic was still a
problem in search of a solution. Towns tried to limit, through laws or tolls,
where and when traveling merchants could sell things. Magistrates restricted the
entry of “shod carts” into towns because they damaged bridges and roads. In one
town, horses were forbidden to drink at the river, as children were often found
playing nearby. Speeding became a social problem. The Liber Albus, the rule book
of fifteenth-century London, forbade a driver to “drive his cart more quickly
when it is unloaded than when it is loaded” (if he did, he would be looking at a
forty-pence speeding ticket or, more drastically, “having his body committed to
prison at the will of the Mayor”).
In 1720, traffic fatalities from “furiously driven” carts and coaches were named
the leading cause of death in London (eclipsing fire and “immoderate quaffing”),
while commentators decried the “Controversies, Quarreling, and Disturbances”
caused by drivers “contesting for the way.” Meanwhile, in the New York of 1867,
horses were killing an average of four pedestrians a week (a bit higher than
today’s rate of traffic fatalities, although there were far fewer people and far
fewer vehicles). Spooked runaways trampled pedestrians underfoot, “reckless
drivers” paid little heed to the 5-mile-an-hour speed limit, and there was
little concept of right-of-way. “As matters now stand,” the New York Times wrote
in 1888, “drivers seem to be legally justified in ignoring crossings and causing
[pedestrians] to run or dodge over vehicles when they wish to pass over.”
The larger the cities grew, and the more ways people devised to get around those
cities, the more complicated traffic became, and the more difficult to manage.
Take, for instance, the scene that occurred on lower Broadway in New York City
on the afternoon of December 23, 1879, an “extraordinary and unprecedented
blockade of traffic” that lasted five hours. Who was in this “nondescript jam,”
as the New York Times called it? The list is staggering: “single and double
teams, double teams with a tandem leader, and four-horse teams; hacks, coupes,
trucks, drays, butcher carts, passenger stages, express wagons, grocers’ and
hucksters’ wagons, two-wheeled ‘dog carts,’ furniture carts and piano trucks,
and jewelers’ and fancy goods dealers’ light delivery wagons, and two or three
advertising vans, with flimsy transparent canvas sides to show illumination at
night.”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Traffic
by Tom Vanderbilt
Copyright © 2008 by Tom Vanderbilt.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2008
Tom Vanderbilt
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-307-26478-7
