Eleven o’clock on a bright midweek morning, and traffic expert Tom Vanderbilt is standing tall against the chain-link fencing that overlooks the northbound lanes of the Kennedy Expressway at Chicago Avenue.
He’s posing for a photo with the host of trucks and cars as a background.
Standing off to the side, I look down and notice that all those vehicles seem to be reducing speed and clumping together.
“We may be causing a traffic jam,” I say.
Glancing over his shoulder, Vanderbilt says sheepishly, “We are,” and, just about then, one huge trailer truck gives a single deep bellow from its horn.
How awkward — or fitting — depending on how you look at it.
Vanderbilt is a freelance writer and author of “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us),” just published by Knopf. It’s a breezy but well-researched 402-page examination of the strange interaction of humanity and multiton metal boxes that can roar along at 88 feet per second (60 m.p.h.) or sit for hours in bumper-to-bumper-to-bumper traffic.
A native of south suburban Oak Forest who now lives in Brooklyn, Vanderbilt writes that driving is “the most dangerous thing most of us will ever do.” Yet he cites study upon study that show we aren’t as adept behind the wheel as we think we are.
He also looks at engineers’ attempts to design safer and more efficient highway systems and how those efforts are often undercut by our humanity — such as the tendency of drivers on highways such as the Kennedy to slow down and gawk at some guy up there on an overpass where a camera is flashing its strobe light.
I’m spending this morning with Vanderbilt, driving around Chicago for more than two hours, talking about traffic. There’s no way for me to take notes as we’re tooling around, so I have a tape recorder.
As on any long drive, our conversation meanders. Here are some high points:
Cell phones vs. passengers: Talking on a cell phone takes concentration, and Vanderbilt’s book points out the many ways in which a driver becomes less attentive while on a call. Because of that split attention, he writes, “We become worse drivers and worse talkers.”
So I ask him if it’s different when the driver is talking with a passenger, as he and I are doing.
“I just saw a report from Florida that analyzed crashes on a highway over a five-year period,” he says. “People who were driving alone got into more crashes than people who were with passengers. It’s another set of eyes to spot potential danger. Another person to see if you’re falling asleep and keep you awake. Another human being the driver’s responsible for.”
“Accidents”: The way we talk about traffic, Vanderbilt says, can make us think that driving a car isn’t as dangerous a task as it can be. Consider the word “accident.”
“Doctors who study diseases and epidemiology say that, once you say something’s an accident, it takes it out of the notion that it can be controlled or reduced or prevented,” he says. “That’s why the British Medical Journal in 2001 announced that the word would not be used in its papers [on traffic statistics].
“I keep stories about ‘accidents’ and saw one about street-racing. I think it was in Maryland last week. People were going 110 … miles an hour. One person went out of control and killed some spectators. … The word ‘accident’ was sprinkled through the story.
“We prefer the word ‘accident’ because we all drive. When you hear about a plane crash, you don’t hear ‘plane accident.’ We wouldn’t feel comfortable with that description because it would indicate someone throwing their hands up and saying, ‘Oh, accidents happen.'”
Fear of driving? I tell Vanderbilt that, while reading his book and seeing all his findings about the inexpertness of drivers, I became a little paranoid behind the wheel. Did that happen to him?
“You know the famous scene from ‘Annie Hall’ when Christopher Walken tells Woody Allen that he sometimes has dreams of swerving into the oncoming headlights of other cars, and, the next day, he’s driving Woody Allen to the airport, and you look at Woody Allen’s face, and he’s absolutely petrified?
“This is the classic thing in traffic safety. You don’t want to petrify people. But, on the other hand, you sort of do. … Forty-three thousand people a year — that’s just fatalities.
“There’s so much associated with driving — romance and excitement. A survey by some Canadian people found that 50 percent of car commercials showed unsafe driving acts. What are they selling?”
Honking: Vanderbilt writes that encased within the frame of a car, we humans have few ways to communicate with each other — and those that we have, such as honking, leave a lot to be desired.
“A couple weeks ago in Brooklyn near my home, someone was jaywalking,” he tells me. “I gave him a honk as I was driving along. It wasn’t meant as an aggressive thing. I then made a left turn and saw a parking place.I got out — and there was the person I’d just honked at. … It was quite embarrassing.”
The morning is nearly over, and I have to get Vanderbilt to an appointment near Addison Street and Western Avenue by noon.
We’re down near Navy Pier, so I pull onto Lake Shore Drive — where traffic is totally clotted because a disabled bus is blocking one of the four northbound lanes. We get past that tie-up, exit at Belmont and head west, slowed by scores of cars, buses and trucks. We’re heading north on Damen when my cell phone suddenly rings.
I pull over to answer it (in part, because I’m on my best driving behavior with Vanderbilt, but also because, klutz that I am, I have a hard time talking on the phone when I’m driving — so I just don’t try).
It’s someone wondering where Vanderbilt is. “We’ll be there in just a couple minutes,” I say.
And I add the reason we’re running a little late: “traffic.”
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Sampling ‘Traffic’
Excerpts from “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us),” by Tom Vanderbilt:
Traffic as a petri dish: “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.”
The language of traffic: “Being in a car renders us mostly mute. Instead of complex vocabularies and subtle shifts in facial expression, the language of traffic is reduced — necessarily, for reasons of safety and economy — to a range of basic signals, formal and informal, that convey only the simplest of meanings.”
The anonymity of drivers: “Unlike the bar in ‘Cheers,’ traffic is a place where no one knows your name. Anonymity in traffic acts as a powerful drug, with several curious side effects. On the one hand, because we feel that no one is watching, or that no one we know will see us, the inside of the car itself becomes a useful place for self-expression. … Drivers desire this solitary ‘me time’ — to sing, to feel like a teenager again, to be temporarily free from the constricted roles of work and home. … The flip side of anonymity, as the classic situationalist psychological studies of Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram have shown, is that it encourages aggression.”
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Road warriors
Tom Vanderbilt’s new book “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)” (Knopf) is filled with surprising information about what it’s like to be a driver in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world:
*n An estimated 22 percent of all restaurant meals in the U.S. are ordered through a car window.
*In Australia, a reckless driver is known as a “hoon.”
*During an hour, a driver will on average reach over to adjust the radio 7.4 times.
*Each year, 350 Americans die in collisions caused by a vehicle entering a highway in the wrong direction of travel.
*One Internet magnate had to pay $71,400 for going 43 m.p.h. in a 25-m.p.h. zone in Finland because of that country’s sliding scale of fines based on an individual’s after-tax income.
*More Americans are driving at 1 p.m. on a Saturday than during the typical rush hour.
*A study of army ants in Panama found that they used a three-lane travel pattern. Outbound ants used the two outer lanes, giving rights to the inner lane to inbound ants, laden with food.
*Drivers in Delhi, India, are estimated to commit nearly 110 million traffic violations a day.
*A “Pittsburgh left” is the maneuver in that city in which a left-turning driver will make the turn as soon as the light goes green and before the oncoming traffic can enter the intersection.
*Pedestrians who are hit by a car going 36 to 45 m.p.h. are twice as likely to die as those hit by one moving 31 to 35 m.p.h. And they’re four times more likely to die than those hit by autos traveling at 26 to 30 m.p.h.
*The items most frequently reported falling off vehicles on Los Angeles freeways are ladders.
*The hours on Super Bowl Sunday when the game is on are 11 percent safer in terms of traffic deaths than a typical Sunday. But the hours after the game are 41 percent more dangerous.
*Americans drove on average 32 miles a day in 2001. That was up from slightly fewer than 21 miles a day in 1960.
* July 5 is the date when Los Angeles highway police usually report the most cases of traffic problems because of dogs and other animals, apparently still spooked by the previous night’s fireworks.
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preardon@tribune.com
