THE SLOW LANE.(Brief Article)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 02-SEP-02

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

From 1950, John Brooks on solving the mid-century jam

A Q. & A. with John Seabrook

Shannon Sohn, the blue-eyed, freckled young helicopter reporter for New York's Channel 7 "Eyewitness News," was sitting in the office at the back of the hangar at Linden Airport, in northern New Jersey, fanning herself with a newspaper and waiting for the traffic to get bad. The office looked like a place where people keep odd hours. The couch had body-length indentations in its cushions, and soft-drink cans and coffee cups were spilling out of the wastebasket.

It was early in the afternoon on Friday, May 24th, or "getaway day," as Channel 7 called it--the start of the Memorial Day weekend and the traditional beginning of the summer traffic season. On days like this, all the drivers who commute in and out of New York City on a typical weekday are joined by the drivers who live in the city and use their cars only on weekends, producing the kind of chaos that traffic reporters in Atlanta or Los Angeles take for granted but New York reporters don't experience every day. If there were truly appalling delays, Sohn had a shot at leading the six-o'clock news. "As a helicopter reporter, that's what you want," she said. "To be first." Helicopter reporters in New York don't have the luxury of following high-speed car chases--there are too many bridges and tunnels in the way. Here a terrible traffic jam is as good as it gets. But would today's traffic be bad enough?

Since September 11th, as anyone who drives in New York knows, traffic patterns have changed. Congestion cleared up when Mayor Giuliani used his special emergency powers to restrict bridge and tunnel crossings into Manhattan below Sixtieth Street. Not since the Second World War had traffic in the city flowed as freely. In April, restrictions were lifted on some crossings, but morning-rush-hour restrictions on lone drivers entering Manhattan remained in effect below Fourteenth Street. Although the cleanup operation at Ground Zero has now ended, Mayor Bloomberg--who, during his campaign, promised to improve the quality of life in New York by making the city less auto-reliant--says that he will keep the restrictions in place while the reconstruction of lower Manhattan continues. Traffic has been getting steadily worse since April, but it's still less crowded in the city now than it was a year ago.

The phone rang in the office. It was the Channel 7 news desk, in Manhattan. The police scanner was reporting an incident that had shut down all the northbound lanes on the New York State Thruway. Sohn and her pilot, Arthur Anderson, hurried outside and climbed aboard NewsCopter 7. Anderson gave me a quick review of the emergency procedures, explaining that if we had to ditch he preferred to do so on land, not in the water. As we took off, Sohn unwrapped a lollipop. She was fourteen weeks pregnant, and relied on cherry-flavored Charms to ward off motion sickness in the chopper. Grape worked better, but it turned her tongue purple.

Linden Airport is near Elizabeth, New Jersey, and just south of Newark airport. As we headed northwest across Newark's sprawling runways, Sohn gathered information from the traffic-news desk. Around noon, a twelve-year-old boy called Scottie Van Dunk, of Mahwah, New Jersey, whose class had been let out of school early, had ridden his bike to a section of the Ramapo River known as "The Forty Foot," a well-known swimming hole just across the New York state line. At 2 P.M., the boy's body had been discovered at the spot where the river runs beside the Thruway. He had drowned, and police officers had shut down the highway for the recovery operation.

By the time we arrived above the scene, at 2:15 P.M., the traffic on the northbound Thruway was backed up for several miles beyond the I-287 interchange. Drivers who had been zipping along the highway minutes before were now trapped and unhappy, and their previously limitless sense of possibility had shrunk to a single option: whether to change lanes. The idea that the delay up ahead might be the result of a disaster far greater than anyone's personal inconvenience rarely occurs to the driver stuck in traffic.

NewsCopter 7's remote-controlled belly-mounted camera roved the river's edge, looking for a body or some other pitiless image of tragedy for the folks at home, but found only a couple of men from the Stony Point Fire Department, stowing rescue gear. Van Dunk's body had been taken away just before we arrived. Sohn directed Anderson to get some pictures of the traffic jam on I-87 and I-287, but said she doubted that this tie-up would be enough to make the six-o'clock news: "For that to happen, we need some really, really bad traffic."

Since 1970, the population of the United States has grown by forty per cent, while the number of registered vehicles has increased by nearly a hundred per cent--in other words, cars have proliferated more than twice as fast as people have. During this same period, road capacity increased by six per cent. If these trends continue through 2020, every day will resemble a getaway day, with its mixture of commuters, truckers, and recreational drivers, who take to the road without regard for traditional peak travel times, producing congestion all day long: trucks that can't make deliveries on time, people who can't get to or from work, air quality that continues to deteriorate as commerce suffers and our over-all geopolitical position weakens because we are forced to become ever more dependent on foreign oil. This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a traffic jam.

What can you do about the traffic? Take the train? The train may be out of commission; Amtrak, the nation's passenger rail service, may be out of business before too long. Fly? Airlines are cutting flights and raising prices to offset heavy losses. Manage traffic better? There are many schemes for managing traffic, but not very many practical ways to reduce the number of vehicles on the roads. Even if people have an alternative to driving, as do many New Yorkers, over time an ever larger number of commuters choose to drive. Today, about 3.6 million people make their way into Manhattan's "hub" (the area below Sixtieth Street) each workday--about the same...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.