Traffic Read Free Page A

every bit the WASP patrician as social reformer, a familiar character then in New York. He thundered at “the stupidity of drivers, pedestrians and police” and bluntly wielded his favorite maxim: “It is easy to control a trained army but next to impossible to regulate a mob.” Eno proposed a series of “radical ordinances” to rein in New York’s traffic, a plan that seems hopelessly quaint now, with its instructions on the “right way to turn a corner” and its audacious demands that cars go in only
one
direction around Columbus Circle. But Eno, who became a global celebrity of sorts, boating off to Paris and São Paulo to solve local traffic problems, was as much a social engineer as a traffic engineer, teaching vast numbers of people to act and communicate in new ways, often against their will.
    In the beginning this language was more Tower of Babel than Esperanto. In one town, the blast of a policeman’s whistle might mean stop, in another go. A red light indicated one thing here, another thing there. The first stop signs were yellow, even though many people thought they should be red. As one traffic engineer summed up early-twentieth-century traffic control, “there was a great wave of arrow lenses, purple lenses, lenses with crosses, etc., all giving special instructions to the motorist, who, as a rule, hadn’t the faintest idea of what these special indications meant.” The systems we take for granted today required years of evolution, and were often steeped in controversy. The first traffic lights had two indications, one for stop and one for go. Then someone proposed a third light, today’s “amber phase,” so cars would have time to clear the intersection. Some engineers resisted this, on the grounds that vehicles were “amber rushing,” or trying to beat the light, which actually made things more dangerous. Others wanted the yellow light shown before the signal was changing to red
and
before it was changing from red back to green (which one sees today in Denmark, among other places, but nowhere in North America). There were strange regional one-offs that never caught on; for example, a signal at the corner of Wilshire and Western in Los Angeles had a small clock whose hand revealed to the approaching driver how much “green” or “red” time remained.
    Were red and green even the right colors? In 1923 it was pointed out that approximately one in ten people saw only gray when looking at a traffic signal, because of color blindness. Might not blue and yellow, which almost everyone could see, be better? Or would that create catastrophic confusion among all those who had already learned red and green? Despite all the uncertainty, traffic engineering soon hoisted itself onto a wobbly pedestal of authority, even if, as the transportation historian Jeffrey Brown argues, engineers’ neutral-sounding Progressive scientific ideology, which compared “curing” congestion to fighting typhoid, reflected the desires of a narrow band of urban elites (i.e., car owners). Thus it was quickly established that the prime objective of a street was simply to move as many cars as quickly as possible—an idea that obscured, as it does to this day, the many other roles of city streets.
    After more than a century of tinkering with traffic, plus years of tradition and scientific research, one would think all these issues would have been smoothed out. And they have been, largely. We drive in a landscape that looks virtually the same wherever we go: A red light in Morocco means the same thing as it does in Montana. A walk “man” that moves us across a street in Berlin does the same in Boston, even if the “man” looks a bit different. (The beloved jaunty, hat-clad
Ampelmännchen
of the former German Democratic Republic has survived the collapse of the Berlin Wall.) We drive on highways that have been so perfectly engineered we forget we are moving at high speeds—indeed, we are sometimes barely aware of moving