In the days before the use of the combustion engine, "traffic" was a word used to
describe anything moving --- pedestrians walking down Main Street, cows being led to
pasture, a horse cart here and there. Anything moving from point A to point B was traf
fic. Nowadays, when someone mentions this word a completely different image is im
printed on our brains. "Traffic" - a gigantic mass of petrol burning vehicular technology
pressed into small tracts of space going nowhere.
Most up to date Homo sapiens spend substantial amounts of time in traffic. They
grumble about it. They honk their horns. They listen to their radios and tape decks. They
used to try to avoid it. Now they try to deal with it. They get up earlier. They get home
later. They buy new DVD's for their tape cassettes. They don't like it. They've signed a
shaky truce with it. They accept it. They've been beaten down by it. Demoralized. De
sensitized. Sometimes they lose it. "Road Rage."
Helicopters, as if scanning the terrain in Vietnam, hover above, monitoring the
crawling masses for the useless traffic report. "The Such and Such Parkway is backed
up from here to eternity. The So and So Expressway should be avoided like the clap.
There's construction at the Hubbadub interchange, where very little is being inter
changed. We are just getting word of a three-car pile up just before the last exit to any
where ... forget it, you're doomed, do you have something to munch, perhaps a video
game, a copy of War and Peace, or better yet, if you are one of those wise guy Soprano
types accompanied by a "broad", this would be a perfect time for a blow job. There is no
hope ... unless you are in a helicopter. This is the Radio S.L.O.W. traffic team getting
out of Dodge. So long suckers ..."
Perhaps the dinosaurs died off because they could not adapt to this environment.
Virtually everyone in a country like the United States inhabits a place where life
revolves around a densely populated urban core. Just about no one is exempt from the
"traffic life style" and its characteristics are almost identical everywhere. Just after WWII,
when the oil and auto industries bludgeoned "their" government (not ours) into a blue
print for transportation based almost exclusively on private automobile use, the scope of
today's traffic quagmire could not have been anticipated. Surely, if there had been a
crystal ball peering fifty years into the future, such a course of action would not have
been taken. But the gradually incremental nature of the problem allowed us to uncon
sciously adapt to each escalation. After more than a half century of being conditioned to
the privacy and comfort of our cars, trying to get Americans to abandon them for some
form of upgraded public transport is, to say the least, a daunting task. Perhaps the most
poignant example I know of this syndrome exists in the urban center closest to where I
live, Miami:
One of the principle roadways connecting Miami to its southern suburbs is a
perpetually glutted "creepway" known as the Dixie Highway. It is the type of road where
it frequently takes 30 minutes to go 3 miles. That's right, just like the road YOU go to
work on. Running parallel to the Dixie Highway is an elevated train known as the "Peo
ple Mover". It was completed about ten years ago. It is clean, well lit, nicely landscaped
... in short, state of the art, even "avant-garde". Everyday, the masses creeping along
on the Dixie Highway can look up and see the silver bullets flying by on the tracks
above. The train is half empty. Plenty of room.
Go figure
.
Is there a way to break this crack-habit addiction to unnecessary automobile use?
The inspiration for this essay came during my latest visit to New York City, my native
land. Being in the "Big Apple" is synonymous with sitting in traffc. It gave me a lot
of time to think and observe.
About a half century ago, when I was still a young boy starting to play Little
League baseball, there was a heavily traveled artery near my house known as the
Horace Harding Boulevard. The Horace Harding Boulevard, like an arqueological re
main sunk under layers of newer civilizations, is gone now, buried beneath the tragedy
known as the Long Island Expressway (the L.l.E.), whose construction commenced in
my boyhood. In truth, this construction has never been completed. I cannot remember
any moment since they started building this road that they were not still working on it,
trying to accommodate more and more cars. They've built upper decks, added new
lanes, widened on and off ramps, redesigned, remodeled and regurgitated the mess we
have today. And they are still working. I swear. I saw it.
What we have here is a dog chasing its tail. The construction, which is meant to
alleviate things in the future, cannot keep up with the demand while it creates horren
dous worlds of massive auto stagnation in the only place we live, the present. We keep
building; we keep standing ... on and on. I can personally attest to the fact that the
standard of living on the L.l.E. is worse now than it was in my childhood, when it had
already earned its famous nickname as the "world's longest parking lot". (There now
seem to be many roads with that nickname, but the L.l.E. was the original.)
The L.l.E. is not unique but emblematic of the whole network of limited access
roadways in and around New York, a system that is quite extensive. (Surely, the situa
tion is similar in all our metropolitan areas.) In bobbing and weaving my way through
this maze, I began to realize there was hardly a "highway", "expressway", "parkway",
"turnpike" or "freeway" anywhere not being worked on. There was nary an approach to
any of the city's great bridges unencumbered by construction barriers and their omi
nously blinking temporary lighting leading us through the makeshift corridors of winding,
jury rigged lanes. Diesel belching dinosaurs surrounded us on all sides, leveling, dig
ging, paving and painting in anticipation of the Broadway opening of the road that would
finaily get us moving. Everywhere I went, the roads were spreading out and growing like
the unstoppable girth of a middle age waistline. There are places where these slabs of
tar and concrete have grown to the width of a football field or more. There are places
where these great highways come together in a free form swirl of ramps and bridges
that occupy enough space to accommodate a small town.
Special mention must be made of an infamous roadway that might be the closest
thing we have to Hell on Earth.
The Cross Bronx Expressway is another joke perpetrated in my childhood by
people with a very bad sense of humor. It runs across the south Bronx like an infected
gash across its chin. "Rush hour" is a concept that does not exist on the Cross Bronx
because the congestion is perpetual. (Someday I'll have to test this road at 3 AM on a
weekday winter night, just to see if it's possible to go 40 MPH.) Its lanes are too narrow,
there are no shoulders for emergencies and its exit ramps are poorly marked and diffi
cult to see. Anyone not intimately married to this sorry excuse for a vehicular conduit,
will be hard pressed to find anything they are looking for. That old Kingston Trio song
about the person who was "lost forever 'neath the streets of Boston", would be more
applicable to the Cross Bronx Expressway. It's easy to imagine the scores of people
who've ended up inexplicably in New Jersey while traveling this artery in search of any
place else ... or even worse, exiting mistakenly into the kind of neighborhood Chevy
Chase lost his tires to in the first of those Griswold vacation hims.
Adding to this inferno is the fact that this highway, for a substantial part of its
length, has been dug deeply into the ground, allowing the streets of the tenement ghetto
above to cross over it. During the daylight hours, this constant checkerboard transit from
the light of day to the inky shadows of innumerable tunnels creates an annoying visibility
problem that makes changing lanes an exercise in paranoia. Just to round out an al
ready negative driving experience, the canyon-like quality of the road magnifies the die
sel-deafening din and further concentrates the fossil fuel pollution it engenders. Noise,
stench, soot blackened walls and tunnels ... hooray for the Global Economy!
For any tourist not familiar with New York, I suggest the following: If you really
want to feel the flavor and personality of the great metropolis, forget Rockefeller Center;
forget the Rockettes; forget the Empire State building. Take a ride on the Cross Bronx
Expressway.
During my latest trip to New York, I came up with a solution for the now universal
trafffic problem. It is a quintessentially American solution because it relies heavily upon
individual initiative and personal choice. No government mandates, no new laws, no
new regulations. If I were President, this is what I'd do:
I will maintain, in a reasonably functional state, the roads we already have in this
country. I will not spend one penny more of taxpayer money on the expansion of this
system. Not one new highway, bridge or tunnel, not one more lane. I will take the
money saved on these projects, plus whatever else it might take if necessary, and pump
it into cutting edge public transport development. The least possible use of fossil fuel
energy sources will be at the core of these efforts. We are a rich country. We can do
this.
The rest is up to you --- each individual has to independently decide. The first
thing you have to do is vote for me. The second thing you have to decide is how much
more of this "traffic life style" you can take. Remember, there will be no more highway
relief forthcoming from me. What you see is what you get and it is not going to get better
if you stay in your car. The choice is yours.
Although this might, at first glance, seem a concept hatched by a "liberal", there
might even be more here for a Republican to like. There are heaps of dollars lost to traf
fic stagnation every year. If we can clear the roads and get the trucks moving, it would
be a tremendous boost to their Holy Economy.
The choice is yours.
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