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.

By Kevin Berger

Read more: Books, Transportation, Cars, Books Features, Environment & Science

Aug. 27, 2008 | BROOKLYN, N.Y. -- 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.

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