THE SLOW LANE.(Brief Article)

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.