Archive for the ‘Traffic Wonkery’ Category

Photo by Jason Eppink/Flickr

I was listening last night to Frances Anderton’s interview with agit-prop artist Robbie Conal on KCRW’s Design and Architecture and was quite surprised to hear, out of nowhere, a discussion of traffic lights.

Why? Because, Conal noted, at every intersection in L.A. there are controller boxes for the traffic signals — “virulent spawn of HAL” — I think he said. These, it turns out, make perfect surfaces for displaying things like posters. So Conal, when he was starting up, went out and actually measured the dimensions of these boxes, and created appropriately sized posters (also using Helvetica Bold so that it could be read by drivers). He noted that if a driver missed one at a certain intersection, he could serially repeat them at a number of intersections so he’d be guaranteed a viewing (depending on the cycle timing!)

This makes Conal, I suppose, LADOT’s unofficial ‘artist in residence.’

Photo Martin Parr, Magnum Photos

Two recent entries have crossed my desk. One, from Martin Parr, who I interviewed some years back. Parr, who makes the banal seem lurid, and vice versa, turns his lens now on the humble parking space. Pictured at right is Mexico City, home of course to the famous “viene viene” boys, who hang around street corners and wave drivers into spots that they’ve secured with chairs, as pictured.

The description for Parking Spaces reads so:

“Between 2002 and 2007, Martin Parr photographed ‘the last parking space’ available in 41 countries – somewhere you could have parked your car, had you been there at the time. Using a compact camera, and driven by wanting to express “the individual frustration of finding somewhere to park, but on a global level”, this is the latest body of work in Martin’s methodical personal address to the issues of globalisation – the desire for a precious parking space being a banal unifier of the middle classes the world over.”

Meanwhile, the always interesting Mikael Colville-Andersen over at Copenhagenize has contributed Stripey Streetness, which, as the description notes:

“A splendid photo series about the zebra crossing as an instantly recognisable symbol in the urban landscape. 130 photographs from 10 countries celebrating that striped zone created in order to keep people out of harm’s way by providing safe passage across city streets. Painted bridges that guide the bustling masses of pedestrians through a city. The zebra crossing is not a destination it itself but it is an important tool in getting yourself from A to B. It funnels all types of people together into one space, for a few brief minutes of togetherness. We are strangers but while waiting for the light to change and for those dozen or so steps through the zone we are in a flock. This photo series shows city life and city people framed within the zebra crossing. People coming and going and waiting. All of them telling us stories with their body language. Wide strides or short steps. Hunched shoulders or head held high. The zebra crossing becomes a stage on which people around the world are brought together.”

Not sure if he’s got Shibuya in there…

Photo by Canadiana/Flickr

Photo by J.Lo/Flickr

Photo by Canadiana/Flickr

Photo by Canadiana/Flickr

Photo: Citynoise.org

As just a short note following up on my comments on Montreal’s strange “Stop” signs, another thing to note of course is the linguistic variation. I’ve just returned from the Westmount region of the city, where the signs are in English (as in the one posted below, which, as Citynoise.org notes, seems a bit odd since the English bit on the street signs has been blacked out).

But one also seems to find bilingual English/French, as well as signs in Mohawk, Inuktitut, and Kahnawake — there may be more. In any case, an interesting reminder of how culture trickles into the standardized regime of traffic safety.

Photo by Tom Vanderbilt

I was struck by these “arret” signs in Montreal, which have an additional sign informing the driver of which other roadways have a stop sign. In theory, I suppose, this is meant to be a good thing, giving the driver information as to who will be stopping, etc.

But there are a few problems. The first is that it took me a few weeks to even notice the supplementary information. The second is that often the sign is just providing redundant information (informing the driver, on say, a one-way street that the opposing street will not be stopping — but of course there will be no oncoming traffic as it’s one-way!). The third, as you can see in the photo, is that it just adds more information to an already complex and quite garish bouquet of warnings.

But the most objectionable thing about these signs is that they exist at all. These are scattered all over “Vieux Montreal,” which has a warren of narrow, pre-automobile streets, with an abundance of pedestrians and cyclists (and horse-drawn carriages). Drivers should be looking at the streets, looking around, not glancing up at a sign to discern who will be stopping and who won’t (that is, if they obey the sign in the first place).

Luxembourg.

As per the just-arrived Pocket World in Figures, from The Economist, the Grand Duchy has the most cars per 1,000 population: 647. (Also a bit improbably, Iceland is second).

Ethiopia claims the lowest rate, tied with Rwanda, with 1 car per 1000.

As an example of the sometime skewed relationship between car ownership and safety (as per Smeed’s Law), Botswana, which has just 42 cars per 1000 residents, is No. 1 in terms of traffic fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants (with 30).

The strangest figure to my mind was the “most injured in road accidents” column. The leader, by far, was Qatar, with 9,989 per 100,000 population. OK, so it also seems have to the most crowded road networks. But still, its injury rate (for a place where alcohol consumption is presumably lower) seems off the charts — its near neighbor, the UAE, for example, has just 183 (maybe the Qatari police are just really good at reporting).

Or is it something else? I do know that the Qataris are terrible when it comes to seat-belt wearing rates. Any other theories/facts/experiences?

They give the enemy clear directions. This from the wonderful little book, The Original Highway Code, which reprints earlier editions of the perennial British bestseller.

Road Grooves, Groovy Road. Photo by ..::w::../Flickr

I’m always interested in unconventional solutions to traffic issues, and reader Paul up in Ontario sent along the following: “I observed recently that on a road under re-construction, the process involved grinding a rough surface on a lane prior to re-surfacing. On a multi-lane road, the lanes were not all surfaced at the same time. As a result, whenever a motorist encountered this “noisy” surface, they shifted to a lane with a smoother surface. As a result, the noisy lane became open!”

His idea would be to pave the left, or “passing” lane in such a way that a driver would presumably only stay in it for a bit before the ensuring vibration became annoying. This would solve the problem of “left-lane” bandits, people who camp out in the lane that is designated, by law or by norm, for passing slower traffic. People would make their passing maneuver, then move back into a lane to the right.

One issue, of course, is that for some people, the fastest drivers, the left-lane becomes their de facto lane, and they may force out dozens of drivers (necessitating all kinds of disruptive lane changes) for their own benefit. This raises another possibility. The road could be grooved in such a way, as in Japan’s Melody Road (that’s an engineer inspecting the road pictured above) to produce a certain sound at a certain speed. Grooving could presumably be laid so that drivers going over a certain speed produced a really grating, revulsive sound (music might be tricky as one person’s annoyance would be another’s delight). In a sort of Nudge-like way, drivers could choose to stay in the unpleasant lane if they wished, but they would be subtly steered toward the more harmonic travel lanes.

The grooves of the Melody Road, it has been suggested, can be rather powerful (and certainly more so than signage): “You need to keep the car windows closed to hear well,” wrote one Japanese blogger. “Driving too fast will sound like playing fast forward, while driving around 12mph has a slow-motion effect, making you almost car sick.” There you have it: Nausea, the new traffic calming device!

The concept has been demonstrated in Denmark as well, much earlier in fact, in the so-called “Asphaltotone,” the creation of artists Steen Krarup Jensen and Jakob Freud-Magnus, shown below (in Danish):

Grooves have already made their mark on road safety, of course. The so-called “Sonic Nap Alert Pattern,” or SNAP, was first tested on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1987 (after numerous instances of “drift off road” crashes due to fatigue and other causes). SNAP had the advantages of not being raised (the Turnpike had to be bare for snow-plowing), and being narrow, so repair and maintenance vehicles could traverse the roadside without obstruction. In time, the Turnpike saw a 70% reduction in DOR crashes after the shoulder rumble strips were installed. They too have a sound quality, of course: They get louder as you’re going faster, and engineers had to strive to adjust the pattern to make sure it was loud enough to be heard over the ambient sound of the car/truck interior.

Pretty groovy.

There’s a part in the book called “The Selfish Commuter,” a bit of a play on Tim Roughgarden’s book Selfish Routing and the Price of Anarchy, that discusses the famous ‘Braess Paradox’ and other ways in which the actions of individual drivers, who may be seeking to maximize their own utility in a transportation network, do not necessarily add up to a more efficiently performing network overall (forming instead a so-called ‘Nash Equilibria,’ which basically means no one driver could change to improve their situation, but nor has a “wisdom of crowds”-esque socially optimal solution been reached). Dietrich Braess, the mathematician after who this famous paradox is labeled, speculated that adding links to a network could, counterintuitively, make things worse (or that closing roads could make things better).

Via Freakonomics and Ars Technica, I was tipped off to a new paper, “The Price of Anarchy in Transportation Networks: Efficiency and Optimality Control,” by Hyejin Youn and Hawoong Jeong at the Korea Advanced Institute of Technology and Michael Gastner of the University of New Mexico’s Sante Fe Institute, appearing in an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters.

What’s interesting about the paper (available here) at least from what I can discern of it (and I’ll be the first to admit my mathematical innumeracy), is that the researchers have applied the theories of Braess, et al., to actual road networks, including Boston, pictured above. They examined a particular section of road network where the “price of anarchy” (essentially letting drivers make their own route choices) was highest. They then compared the original network to a new condition in which one of the 246 streets was closed to traffic. “In most cases,” they write, “the cost increases when one street is blocked, as intuitively expected.”

However, they found six places where, they write, the removal of one will actually “decrease the delay in the Nash equilibrium, shown as dotted lines in Fig. 2. [above]. If all drivers ideally cooperated to reach the social optimum, these roads could be helpful; otherwise it is better to close these streets.” It’s hard to imagine residents of those streets petitioning local politicians that closing their streets to traffic would help offset “disadvantageous Nash flow.”

In any case, the finding — which implies that Braess paradox is “more than an academic curiosity” — should really blow Click and Clack’s minds up in Harvard Square. I’d be curious to hear of potential criticisms of the work (via email that is sent in the most socially optimal manner!)

Occupational hazard I suppose, but lately I seem to be having traffic thoughts wherever I go, times when I feel like I really need an operations engineer on hand to answer burning questions of perhaps little consequence.

To wit, I’ve been boarding a lot of planes lately and have been curious about the boarding process. Certain seat parameters are announced, a bunch of people rush up to the agent, they are scanned through, and then there’s that stretch of gloriously empty boarding tunnel you go bounding down — until the moment, usually when you round the curve, that you hit the back of a queue. So you set your bag down, until the person ahead moves, then you creep up, then you wait, etc. It often gets me to wondering: Would it be any more efficient to allow people through the initial bottleneck any more slowly, so they could magically walk uninterruptedly to their seat? How much time is wasted in these shuffling stop and go steps? Would it be better to stagger arrivals so that there’s less chance for a queue to form? Or would the queue just form somewhere else? I know many people have thought long and hard about the best way to “plane” passengers, but not sure if this particular quirk has come up.

These thoughts came up again when reading an interesting post I missed the first time around over at Khoi Vihn’s Subtraction. It concerned the author’s interest in the new “destination-based dispatching” elevator system at his place of work. DDB, as I’ll call it, is the new new thing in the elevator biz; basically, instead of putting people onto an elevator and having them choose their appropriate destination, it has people choose their destination and then puts them on an appropriate elevator.

In any case, Khoi Vinh rounded up an elevator expert to talk these things over. One thing that came up was an idea that I touch lightly upon in the book: The comparisons of elevator traffic to vehicular traffic. (in the case of Traffic it’s an engineer with LA DOT comparing the problem of synchronizing traffic signals to elevator flow). But in this case, Vinh makes another analogy: “For instance, there are four basic modes of traffic: balanced mode, in which up and down calls are evenly distributed throughout the building; up-peak mode, in which most traffic wants to go up (mornings, usually); down-peak mode, in which most traffic heads downwards (close of business, usually); and lobby-peak mode, in which the majority of the traffic goes from the lobby upwards.”

In essence, “vertical transportation engineers,” as elevator types are known, have a very similar job to “horizontal transportation engineer,” at least in terms of managing peak-hour flows. Shortly after everyone in a place like Shanghai has fought through the traffic and gotten to their job at a tall office tower, they then face new traffic troubles (which have even included calls for “traffic cop” style monitors). Of course, elevator types have an edge, as I can’t imagine how “destination-based dispatching” could really be made to work in the vehicular traffic world (perhaps if DOTs manipulated routing and real-time traffic data?).

Another problem similar to traffic is the idea that some waits seem worse than others. As the engineer tells Vinh, “destination-based dispatching changes the name of the game — because the technical problem to solve is [no longer] minimizing people’s hall call wait time, but rather their total elevator involvement time.” DDB plays a bit of psychological havoc because while people’s total trip may be shorter, they may spend longer in the lobby, watching others board first, wreaking havoc with their sense of social justice. Ramp-meters in traffic have the same rough effect (even though their better for the long-term trip in most cases).

Still, it’s a fascinating world, extolled in places like Elevator World magazine. There, we learn such things as the fact that lunchtime elevator traffic, in one building study, accounted for 12% of building population (almost seems low, no?). As in car traffic, there’s all sorts of clever counting devices too, from photos of “lobby counts” to “traffic analyzers” that “record the time every landing and car call is made and cleared.” As in car traffic some have even suggested “flex time” arrangements would help alleviate morning up-peak flows.

For more on this, do see, if you haven’t already, Nick Paumgarten’s piece on elevators in the New Yorker, which I have to say is the piece that’s brought me the most pleasure in that magazine all year.

In the ongoing series of local residents’ efforts to slow traffic in their neighborhoods, I bring you this fake speed camera, installed by a dentist in Hamburg.

Said the dentist: “This street leads to school and kindergarten. But it does not seem to interest the drivers. The limit is 60, but despite this they are always racing.”

The report notes the curious detail that because “Kaps’ fake speed radar does not emit a light which might endanger traffic, he has not broken the law.”

One of the oft-revisited themes in the book is that individual actors in traffic don’t often have an idea of what might be best for traffic as a whole. In a great piece in the New Scientist (sub required), “Why Complex Systems Do Better Without Us,” Mark Buchanan (whose book The Social Atom is high on my reading list), writing about the traffic physicist Dirk Helbing, makes the following point:

“Although the behaviour of individuals is often simple, the collective patterns to which it leads can be counter-intuitive, making common sense a faulty guide to what might happen. For example, it is generally true that traffic jams become more likely as traffic density increases. It’s not always the case, though, as Helbing’s group has shown.

Consider a two-lane road carrying both cars and trucks, where the cars are moving faster on average. At low traffic densities, the cars have plenty of space to overtake and can easily pass the trucks. As the traffic density increases, drivers find it more difficult to overtake because other vehicles are in the way. However, evidence from simulations and real traffic flows shows that at a critical density of traffic, the obstruction to lane-changing begins to have a beneficial effect. Because drivers tend to stay in one lane, they disturb the flow of traffic less, leading to a higher total throughput of vehicles.”

Another interesting strand in the piece is the notion that allowing traffic lights to control themselves would improve traffic flow. Instead of set timing patterns or even merely “synchronization,” the lights judge conditions for themselves and make constant adjustments (this is essentially the high-tech version of Hans Monderman’s “bottom-up” traffic scheme in the Netherlands). This is one of the next frontiers of traffic, and I’ve had described to me fascinating systems employing “genetic algorithms” for things ramp meter lights — the ramp meters would in essence keep learning over generations of traffic flow, evolving into smarter systems.

Of course, the new light schemes run the risk of not making sense to the individual driver, as Buchanan notes: “Nonetheless, the behaviour of the lights doesn’t generally fit with human notions of what ought to be efficient. “How long lights stay green is unpredictable,” says Lämmer. Yet the average journey times go down and become more predictable.”

The piece includes what may come to be a mantra: “Being in control, it seems, may increasingly demand being a little out of control.”

Apologies again for the interruption in programming, but I’m in London promoting the book and there’s precious little time for bloggery. For your momentary amusement, however, I offer this Disney short (which predates even Motor Mania), which offers a suggestive cartoon glimpse at the state of driving conduct circa the early 1930s.

I’m briefly in Dublin — lovely city but I’m trying to figure out the traffic. Is it me or do the pedestrian crossings seem harder than they should in the center? I feel as if I’ve been waiting for the lights a long time at what seem like minor streets (even after pushing the button), as a trickle of cars go by at rather high speeds. So I jaywalk when I can. On the ride from the airport, the driver of the car I was in was pulled over by a cop for being in the bus/taxi lane. Turns out there’s a lawsuit in the works to let limos use that lane too, which hasn’t been settled. But the Garda officer and the driver exchanged a few pleasantries and we were on our way. The driver said to me: “In England, the police would have given me a ticket. Here you can talk your way out of these things.”

I was just reading a profile of former Blur frontman Damon Albarn in the Sunday Times when this line jumped out: “He’s about to release an LP – the real vinyl thing – of Chinese traffic noise.” Wow. The mind reels. One track for each city? “Guangzhou Morning Rush Hour?” Anyone know any further details on this one?

Photo by Bruce Bisping, Star Tribune

Twin Cities reader Matt sends along this link to another kind of novel traffic calming (at least, “informal” traffic calming), a series of unorthodox signs by artist Steven Woodward, who, is apparently, former artist in residence with the St. Paul Public Works Department (and how great it is that the public works department has an artist in residence?). The artist’s goal is to help give neighborhoods a sense of place, at least in the eyes of passing drivers. My personal favorite is the one above, as it makes me wonder if the persuasive powers of eye contact, even simulated eye contact, might induce drivers to slow down. In any case, it’s certainly more interesting than a “Resident Parking Only” sign.

In three more cranks of the wheel we should be in Brighton...

When in London next week I will certainly be headed to the British Library at some point to see the small exhibit on weird and wonderful gadgets collected by Maurice Collins.

Of particular interest here is this wrist-watch style navigation system, called the Plus Fours Routefinder, on which the driver would wind the little scrolled paper maps along as he drove (not sure what to do if the main route was congested). The Routefinder, which covered a variety of routes, featured updated distances as well as a “Stop” instruction — but hopefully you would realize you were in, say, London before the little device said so. Not sure if listed petrol stations and the like.

(via Company Car Driver)

While writing the book, there were a number of films that stood out for being particularly emblematic of the traffic experience. I’m not talking road films here (no Two-Lane Blocktop or Vanishing Point), but traffic films, movies that reveal interesting glimpses of the strange social dynamics of traffic (and they don’t have to be particularly good, just interesting traffic-wise). I’m curious to hear other favorites from readers.

1. Motor Mania. Directed by Jack Kinney, 1950.

Originally part of a driving safety instructional film, this Walt Disney short really does a lovely job of describing motorist sociopathy. Everyman (or, er, Everydog) Goofy begins the film as “Mr. Walker,” a nice person who “wouldn’t step on an ant.” In his car, he becomes “Mr. Wheeler,” suddenly terrorizing his former walking comrades, questioning the skills and rights of way of other drivers, and generally acting like a monster. Per minute this really packs the most traffic wisdom. A bit hard to get nowadays, but through Disney Educational Productions you can buy a DVD that also includes a few other films (including Freewayphobia, about driving on the then new superhighways).

2. Trafic. Directed by Jacques Tati, 1971.

With a title like Trafic, how could you not like this one? This overlooked work from French master Tati is hardly his best (it’s no Hulot or Playtime), but there’s enough of the Tati touch to make this one worthwhile. “I’m simply trying to show that individuals change when they’re behind the wheel of a car,” Tati said, and in one of the film’s funniest segments, he presents a succession of shots of oblivious French drivers languidly picking their noses in the perceived anonymity of their cars (people who actually research drivers with in-car cameras have found this happening after the first week or so of the camera being inside the car). This film has been unavailable for a long time (I’ve got a weird Swedish edition), but it’s recently been reissued by Criterion.

3. Falling Down. Directed by Joel Schumacher, 1993.

I can never really make it through the whole thing these days, but I do love the bit that sets off Michael Douglas’ whole repressed-guy-in-a-tie silent majority crusade of rage: A traffic jam. It’s hot, he’s stuck, the merge signs are blinking, a fly in his car is bothering him, the “How’s My Driving? Dial 1-800 EAT-SHIT” bumper stickers accost him — even a Garfield stuffed animal seems to stare back maniacally. He does what many of us have probably wanted to do at some point — just leave the car and walk away.

4. Weekend. By Jean Luc-Godard, 1967.

As the story goes this is actually partly inspired by Julio Cortazar’s great story “The Southern Thruway,” about an epic traffic jam that gradually turns into a sort of society. This story itself begins with an epigraph from L’Espresso magazine: “Sweltering motorists doe not seem to a have a history… As a reality a traffic jam is impressive, but doesn’t say much.” I beg to differ! Anyway, Godard’s black comedy features, famously, the epic, slow drive down a French highway full of carnage, people playing games, arguing, etc. The soundtrack is horns but no one seems to actually be blowing their own. A bit dated these days but worth it for the cool Citroens and Puegots alone…

5. Office Space. Directed by Mike Judge, 1999.

Funny in all sorts of ways, but particularly for my purposes for the opening scene. Peter (Ron Livingston), frustrated by the constant stop and go of his commute — so slow that he observes an old man pushing a walker pass him by on the sidewalk — sees the other lane moving faster. He manages to change lanes, slamming on the brakes as his lane suddenly freezes up. His former lane, of course, begins to move ahead. This is the one of the classic issues in congestion, and is discussed in the book (you can watch a clip here).

6. LA Story. Directed by Mick Jackson, 1991.

Full of whimsical looks at LA traffic life, sort of like Crash without the heavy-handedness. My favorite scene is when Steve Martin gets in his car to go to his next door neighbor’s house, but there’s other good moments, like his crazy shortcuts to get to work, or the ongoing metaphysical conversation with the “changeable message signs” that give traffic info to LA drivers — as if CALTRANS had been replaced by a higher authority (not that there is one for the average LA driver).

nat_lampoon_european_vacation_1985

7. National Lampoon European Vacation. Directed by Amy Heckerling, 1985.

Not as good as the original and really doesn’t hold up at all anymore (if it ever did), but memorable for one scene: Chevy and family entering a roundabout in London and finding themselves unable to leave. Round and round they go, until night falls and Chevy is babbling uncontrollably. Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing people still think of when they hear the word ’roundabout,’ but modern roundabouts — and please repeat after me — are safer and handle traffic flows better than conventional four-way signalized or stop-sign marked intersections.

8. Singles and Mission Impossible: III (tie).

I lump these together because they both feature characters who are transportation engineers (one an aspiring, and the other, well it’s only his cover, he’s really a spy, but still…). Traffic engineers are hardly the next architects when it comes to giving movie characters ostensibly sexy and easy-to-depict careers (he’s carrying a tube of blueprints — whoa, he’s an architect!), so I’m always interested when they appear. In Cameron Crowe’s Singles, Campbell Scott plays Cliff, an idealistic engineering student who’s obsessed with a “super-train.”

Here’s his pickup line to a fellow single: “Let me ask you a question. You think about traffic? Because I do, constantly. Traffic is caused by the single car driver. Single people get in their cars every morning. They drive and wonder why there’s gridlock.” (Note the double meaning of the word “single”!)

In MI III, we get the pleasure of hearing Tom Cruise drop this line at a cocktail party: “You hit the brakes for a second, just tap them on the freeway, you can literally track the ripple effect of that action across a two-hundred-mile stretch of road, because traffic has a memory. It’s amazing. It’s like a living organism.” And then leaves to mix a drink or something, leaving his guests to digest his feverish musings.

9. Rain Man and Midnight Cowboy. There are two great Dustin Hoffman in the crosswalk moments, and I find each striking for they say about traffic. The first, in Midnight Cowboy, is the famous Ratso Rizzo “I’m walkin’ here” tirade, directed against a taxi cab that has violated his right of way. Indelibly funny stuff, the stuff of ring-tones, and it’s something every New Yorker has wanted to shout at some point (and more New Yorkers, I must point out, are killed crossing with the light than against). The second, in Rain Man (directed by Barry Levinson, 1988), finds Hoffman as the autistic savant Raymond. He’s walking in a crosswalk in a small town when suddenly the light flashes to “don’t walk.” Of course, in traffic law this only means do not enter the crosswalk, but to Raymond’s rigidly programmatic way of thinking, he takes this as a command to stop directly where he is, until he’s retrieved by Tom Cruise (not playing a traffic engineer in this one). This moment in its own way to some of the subtle problems of excessive traffic signs and signals in that an over-reliance on their instructions can see us rather losing the ability to think for ourselves, arguably placing us in new dangers.

10. Sunrise. Directed by F.W. Murnau, 1927.

I was going to go with the otherwise fairly forgettable Starman here for its scene in which the alien, learning the customs of Earth, finds out that the yellow signal at a traffic light means go “really fast,” but I wanted to end on a more lyrical note with this classic, hugely influential silent film. The rush of city traffic is a virtual character in the film, but in one famous moment, the husband and wife cross a large city square, and as the cars and trolleys and horses bear down upon them, they stop to kiss and magically fade into the traffic itself in an intensely memorable scene. Alas, if only traffic were so simple…

Mergers and Disquisitions

I recently met a kindred spirit, on the other coast, who had been stewing over a type of problem similar to that which had launched my own multi-year investigation into the strange social dynamics of traffic: Merging.

Cynthia Gorney, who teaches at the University of California-Berkeley journalism school and writes for National Geographic and many other places (this after an award-winning career at the Washington Post), kept stumbling upon a daily drama at the Caldecott Tunnel, in Northern California (pictured above). There were people who would dutifully line up on the narrow approach the tunnel entrance, and then people who would “sidezoom” along a frontage road, veering back into the active lane at the last moment. The whole thing is described in her insightful, and very funny New York Times Magazine article today, titled “The Urge to Merge.”

Her merging problem is a distinct problem from the “early” and “late” merge I describe in my book, which in the specific case I was discussing only relates to construction work zone merges in which two lanes are dropping to one, and signage warns something like “merge right, one mile.” Caldecott, as far as I can surmise, as I haven’t experienced it myself, is a strange situation; one, because unlike a temporary construction zone situation, the same thing repeats itself every day at Caldecott — the dilemma is built into the very landscape — and much of the traffic on it is presumably daily commuters (and indeed, an “evolutionary stable strategy” appears to have taken hold by which, according to Gorney’s reckoning, two-thirds of people line up and one-third side zoom). Two, the lane that the side-zoomers are using isn’t technically, as in my situation, a lane that was going to become inactive (and thus the people using it as a sort of merging reservoir weren’t holding up traffic going elsewhere). It is spare capacity to the extent the frontage road is not used very often, but then one wonders if it should just be turned into a de facto merging bay, and marked accordingly. Rather than stigmatizing “cheaters” and upsetting the prevailing order, this would institutionalize the practice, thus, presumably, easing the social tensions.

But the fact that the geometries and psychologies of Gorney’s own merge problem could yield a long article, full of interesting traffic tidbits and theories, speaks to the complexities of traffic. Merging prescriptions, it seems to me, are like medicine: Use only where directed (and watch out for side effects). The people in New York who use an active lane to drive to the front of the queue on the FDR to jump onto the onramp for the Brooklyn Bridge (dangerously stopping for a moment in the middle of that active lane, forcing everyone in their lane to then merge left, at relatively high speeds) should receive a good old-fashioned Singaporean caning, IMHO.

And of course it’s really just more than merging at stake here. These sorts of tensions strike right to the heart of American culture. Gorney found herself musing at the merge point, “this is the problem with modern American capitalism, really, this anti-aristocratic all-men-are-created-equal narrative we pretend to cherish while simultaneously celebrating the individual’s right to do whatever advances his own interests without technically breaking the law.” I think something similar may underlie the left-lane-is-for-faster-traffic dynamic on U.S. roads: It’s a good idea in practice, but someone’s always going to want to go faster, and that person’s rights are going to mash up against the guy who’s already going pretty damn fast, is exiting on the left soon anyway, and thinks he also has a right to be in the lane he’s in.

I later emailed Gorney a fragment I had come across in Robert Axelrod’s classic The Evolution of Cooperation, talking about experimental war games and strategy: “When the players will never meet again, the strategy of defection is the only stable strategy.” Isn’t this really the heart of traffic — there’s little incentive for doing the right thing when your good deed won’t be recorded in future rounds by your fellow game players. Perhaps, as the WOPR computer put it in that classic of 80s geekdom War Games, “the only winning move is not to play.”

In any case, I recommend the article highly, and not just because it contains the words “Vanderbilt’s book is terrific…” Follow the link or check out the text after the jump, and Happy merging!
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Just back home and going through all the good mail that’s been coming in after Week One of the tour. I had two trivial observations based on recent trips to Boston and D.C. In Boston, don’t know the particular address, I saw an interesting sign that said “Shared Space,” 10 mph. This is a European idea I haven’t seen previously expressed in the U.S., at least so literally. Anyone know its origins?

Also, while on the traffic signs tip, what’s up with the weird, yellow one-way signs in D.C., with their extremely small indications of what times the streets are one way and when they’re not? They seemed hard to scan while deciding whether or not to turn into a street. And is it just me or do they almost look like advertising notices?

Interchange tiles by Jess Giffin & Jim TerMeer

From an essay called “The Post-Carbon Highway,” by Geoffrey Thun and Kathy Velikov, in a jam-packed little book called Fuel, I just came across this interesting nugget, about the 401 highway in Toronto: “There are approximately 160 off-ramp interchanges along the 401. In total, approximately 8000 acres of land is underutilized as a result of its spatial isolation by the interchange configuration.”

Ever since J.G. Ballard’s novel Concrete Island, in which a man crashes and is stranded in an urban highway interchange, I’ve been fascinated by these dead zones, huge swaths of territory that we blindly whisk past. Thun and Velikov have their own ideas of what to do with them, but a few other ideas: Plant victory gardens of ethanol producing corn. Install turbines that capture the air generated by exiting vehicles. Put versions of Robert Smithson’s land-art sculpture the “Spiral Jetty” insider their clover-leaf loops. And didja know, by the way, that the weird little triangular bit of space between the highway and the off-ramp is called, rather ominously, the “gore area.” (nothing to do with crashes, but still…)

Photo by Kimberley Hockings

All the discussion about giving Great Apes new rights in Spain reminded me of an interesting “traffic study” of sorts that had been done involving chimpanzees — with whom we share 98% of our DNA — in Guinea.

In a fascinating report, a group of researchers set out to learn how a recently enlarged road, running through the territory of a 12-strong chimp colony, might have changed their behavior. After all, roads have been known to have had quite negative effects on wildlife. Interestingly, though, the chimps seemed to “draw on a phylogenetically-old principle of protective socio-spatial organization to produce flexible, adaptive and cooperative responses to risk.” In other words, they learned to cross the road.
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