The author cops to a perverse addiction By PHIL PATTON I like to lie in bed, sip my morning coffee, and watch traffic on television: all those wonderful skycam shots of choke points and critical jams, stacks and helixes. Now, I don’t enjoy being stuck in traffic. Nor do I take any special pleasure in watching my fellow drivers suffer. It’s just that the more I study its patterns and listen to its peculiar language—bottlenecks, rubberneckers, fender benders, and jackknifed tractor trailers—the more I can’t resist the mesmerizing beauty of traffic. Skycams lend a weird romance to banal settings. Depending on the weather and light—which the camera always exaggerates—TV traffic reports often show lovely, misted, painterly landscapes. Before sunrise the scene is a lavalike flow of magnesium headlights and red taillights. As the natural and artificial fuse, dawn brings a softer, more abstract series of images. Recently I saw a shot of an overturned truck on a roadway quite familiar to me. It was jarring to realize that what on-screen appears lush and green is experienced as a grim concrete chute squeezing traffic from the Garden State Parkway onto Route 17—a piece of engineering stupidity on which cement barriers block drivers’ view of a grove of trees just feet away. When I tire of TV reports I log onto the Web and check out traffic in Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, Houston. I especially like the "situation cam" in Seattle, where I can indulge in the schadenfreude of seeing the jams that wealth has created. Some people dial in to surf cams to imagine themselves on the beach at Pismo or Malibu; I log onto the L.A.-area traffic sites and monitor the 405. Traffic has become such an integral part of daily life that in some metropolitan areas it can almost be defined as an adjunct to weather. It receives equal billing on local television and radio news. The storm and sunshine of our mobile lives, it fascinates and obsesses us more than we realize. I’m not talking simply about the obvious effects—the hours lost in jams, the gallons burned at idle, the air pollution generated. Traffic has reshaped our inner lives as well. Like standing in line in a country with rationing or stalking prey in a hunting society, sitting in one’s car has become a central experience of the modern automotive age. Reyner Banham, author of the book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), was one of the first theorists to look at traffic as a cultural phenomenon. He said that highways had become common space, replacing the marketplace and square. Exiting on the L.A. freeway ramp, Banham wrote, was "like coming indoors." Now of course the predictions of 40 years ago that L.A. sketched the future have been fulfilled. Government studies report that from 1970 to 1997 the U.S. population increased 32 percent, and the number of drivers and vehicles rose 65 and 85 percent, respectively. In New Jersey there are more registered cars than licensed drivers. What L.A. begot in the 1950s, Atlanta has raised to a new level in the last decade. In an effort to control "volume," it has the most elaborate system in the nation to track and control traffic. With some 50 miles of highway "under camera" as part of the Georgia Navigator system, Atlanta not only monitors flow by sign and Web site but also directs units that deploy rapidly to deal with incidents such as flat tires and fender benders. Online you can look at maps and learn about accidents and slowdowns. You can also find out about construction and get instant images of key intersections. Having spent a lot of time driving around the Peach City, I particularly enjoy its traffic Web site. I’ll click on the surveillance camera at, say, "Interstate 75/85 N of Lakewood Fwy" or "I-85 N of Shallowford Rd," catching the view at GDOT camera 44. Or I’ll click on another dot and learn about "an incident of construction, on eastbound I-285, off-ramp to Riverdale Road in Clayton County," categorized as "Low Impact, with 1 Right Lane Affected." Linked by fiber-optic cable laid down at a cost of $1 million per mile, the whole Atlanta system is run from a central HQ. You should take a look at it: wherever you live, you paid for much of it. Most of the funds for the $140 million project came from the federal government. Terrified by the prospect of Olympic gridlock in 1996, the Feds pitched in money from the Intermodal Surface Transportation Act. Some 400 cameras are wired into the system; about 70 of them are color and outfitted with little robot heads, which pan and zoom as the cars go by. Atlanta’s war room, with huge video screens tracking problem areas, serves as the main deployment center for response teams called HEROs (Highway Emergency Response Operators) who dash out in trucks to clear away broken-down cars, repair flats, adjudicate smashups. Much of the information in the war room is visible on the Web page. Yet for all its techno-wizardry, the system just barely keeps traffic flowing. Experts are forced to think about traffic in new ways. Once the metaphor was circulatory. Highways and streets were arteries; the flow of people and goods was the goal. But researchers increasingly believe that the road is a teeming market of microdecisions: Do I cut in front or bide my time? Is the left lane moving faster or should I try the right? At Los Alamos Laboratory, supercomputers devoted to nuclear weapons research have been turned to traffic analysis. "Think of tanks, only without the turrets," says one scientist involved in the program, expressing a sentiment recognized by road warriors everywhere. Battle software is now applied to the morning commute; wind-current experiments from nuclear winter studies help predict the propagation of traffic emissions. I know this attraction to traffic is a little perverse. But there seem to be many traffic buffs. A few years ago the term "weather porn" was applied to videos of tornadoes and other natural disasters. Today traffic porn is with us, born the afternoon O. J. Simpson took to the freeway in his Bronco and the nation watched for hours as helicopters fed raw footage to TV sets across the country. There are now TV shows devoted to high-speed police chases shot from helicopters. Think of it as traffic’s extreme sport. The old cliché about weather seems to apply equally to traffic: everybody complains; no one does anything about it. But that may be changing. Planners are working on "electronic" highways to speed the flow of cars. One federally funded experiment in California uses wires embedded in the pavement, onto which vehicles will lock and cruise bumper to bumper at rapid speed. To this traffic buff, however, such systems suggest a high-tech version of the belt that carries your vehicle through the car wash. Do we really want to live in a world where all roads flow smoothly? You know, I don't.
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