It`s spring break on this six-mile crescent of sand in the Gulf of Mexico, and when night falls the two-lane road connecting the island to the southern Florida peninsula is bumper-to-bumper beneath the palms and flickering roadside neon.
This motorized mambo of youthful cruisers is the ever-so-slow-moving rite of passage that`s been enacted by youthful drivers on countless Main Streets across America for many years and celebrated on the silver screen a generation ago in ”American Graffiti.”
And after a day of screwdrivers and suds on the sun-drenched beach in this retreat for college revelers, the night belongs to Michelin, and the thoroughfare belongs-or so it seems-to pink-cheeked dudes in polo shirts and big-haired Buffys who may end up sharing nothing more than a healthy disregard for automobile etiquette.
Here`s one behind the wheel with his bare left foot dangling out the window of the driver-side door. Here`s another one in a red convertible, locked in a private, preening session with her blush and rearview mirror. Here`s a front-seat passenger taking a quick pull on an aluminum can whose contents, it can be presumed, may not be consumed legally in a moving vehicle. And the eyes, the bright and darting eyes of youth, are seemingly everywhere but on the task of negotiating a ton or so of steel and glass along a public roadway.
These are the frisky, formative years for the American driver, a species whose love affair with the automobile has been documented throughout the 20th Century. But that affection is only rarely extended to the operators of other vehicles that share the road.
From Newport Beach, Calif., to Newport, R.I., the coast-to-coast congestion of cars and trucks has begun to temper the free-spirited enthusiasm of drivers, who increasingly encounter exasperation more than exhilaration on the nation`s traffic corridors.
”Have you ever driven in Boston?” asks an animated Michael McGinn, an instructor at the Chicago-based Community Driving School, voicing a combustible mixture of astonishment and relief that he survived six years of teaching driving in that New England city before returning to the relative calm of the Midwest. ”You get people driving on the shoulders of the highway at 60 or 70 miles per hour. Routinely. Believe me, it was a pleasure to come back to Illinois.
”I`m like anyone else,” McGinn continues. ”I`m out there doing the right thing, and I see someone else who isn`t, and I resent it. A big part of what we try to do is teach social responsibility in your interaction with other drivers. Courtesy is contagious, but a lot of drivers in the U.S. act like nobody else should be on the road.”
The American driver, says McGinn, too often regards the rudimentary rules of the road with contempt or apathy.
”We take driving for granted,” he says, ”forgetting that it was designed as a privilege. Now, everybody considers it a right. A lot of students coming to us don`t know that much about etiquette or rules. They think they can drive immediately. But the biggest weakness is the eyes-training the eyes for proper driving. And forgetting that a car is a deadly weapon out there.”
For one hot, horrifying summer, in 1987, the seething frustrations of American motorists boiled over on the car-choked freeways of Southern California, with almost daily incidents of traffic discourtesies that provoked obscene gestures, screaming bouts, fistfights and, ultimately, gunshots that killed or wounded more than two dozen drivers.
That outburst, unprecedented in its scope and unduplicated since, prompted social ecologist Raymond W. Novaco, a professor at the University of California at Irvine, to advance the hypothesis that the auto represents ”a private bubble of sensitized space that allows the Mr. Hyde in us to emerge when we are crossed.”
Warned Novaco of the Wild, Wild West behavior of such manically macho road warriors: ”While we can learn to control our own anger, the anger of others is not easily controlled. We can, however, keep from stoking their fire by steering away from conflict and antagonism. Getting drawn into battle with anyone competing for our road space is an ego-oriented script with a bad ending. Instead, awareness of traffic conditions, alertness to potential danger and coolness of thought will add mileage to our lifetimes.”
The romanticized notion of a liberating drive on an open road has gone the way of the Edsel in many American urban districts, replaced by the reality of bone-jarring potholes, numbing rush hours and dangerously overheated Type A drivers.
From the time Henry Ford put his motorized buggy on the cobblestone, there have been road hogs and inattentive and distracted drivers aplenty. But as technology has made the automobile a cocoon of pleasure and potential productivity, the conditions of modern driving have influenced road comportment for the worse, experts contend.
”We`ve all looked incredulously at the guy who just missed our fender by a couple of inches and seen him jabbering away on his cellular phone,” says Richard Doyle, a senior research associate at the University of Michigan`s Transportation Research Institute. ”Now we`re looking at cars equipped with faxes and personal computers, voice-interactive controls, navigational devices, collision-avoidance systems, you name it.”
Doyle, whose vehicles have nothing more technologically advanced than cruise control, says he has avoided a moving violation citation for more than 20 years by following a simple maxim when behind the steering wheel: ”Drive scared, drive safe.”
Reinforcing that defensive approach, he adds, is the plastic body of his 1984 Pontiac Fiero. ”I run into anything with that and I`m worm meat,” he observes.
But one keen-eyed chronicler of America`s driving habits, writer Bill Neely, who has produced biographies of American racing legends Richard Petty, A.J. Foyt and Cale Yarborough, contends that more motoring mayhem is wrought by indecisiveness and timidity than putting the pedal to the metal.
”I think of the American driver as essentially timid,” says Neely, who lives on a farm in Jane Lew, W.Va., in the Allegheny foothills and also has written a novel about stock-car drivers, ”Stand on It,” under his pen name Stroker Ace. ”That doesn`t mean they`re not good, but timidity can get you in trouble.”
Neely began driving his father`s pickup truck at age 12, making runs to the train depot to pick up freight orders for the family`s hardware store.
”I wanted to drive from the time I was 3 years old,” he recalls. ”I couldn`t wait. And when I did finally start, I only hit the depot once.”
Now, he drives a Porsche around some of the country`s hilliest, more hairpin routes.
”I like to think I can still zip around,” he says, but notes that the topography puts a governor on his inclination to let it rip.
”I used to live in Texas where, particularly before the advent of speed limits, people drove like the hammers of hell because they had such great distances to cover and because of all those great open stretches of highway where you could see for miles.”
Drivers in Southern states, Neely says, tend to be more civil than in other regions, and motorists in Indiana, he adds, are ”probably the best and most spirited drivers between the coasts.”
He reserves his highest praise for California drivers who, Neely concedes, are apt to ”take a lot more chances, but at least you know if somebody signals they`re going to change lanes, they change lanes, by God.”
Neely, who recently took a 10-day trip to France, also acknowledges that there are times when good old-fashioned American timidity can be a life-enhancing virtue.
”I`ve been in Paris and Rome at rush hour,” he says, ”and I`d rather be on the opening lap of the Daytona 500. You`ve got a better chance of surviving there.”
