The city of Chicago is home to one million registered cars and 64 miles of expressway. If you own a car your share is about four inches of roadway. We all know the scene when everyone wants his four inches. You’re on one of Chicago’s many multilane, terminally straight, irreproachably flat expressways, and traffic’s flowing fine. But then a cloud passes across the sun, the radio station lapses into a 1980s flashback track, and things start to move with the viscosity of molasses. You’re left contemplating the median strip as you know it was never intended to be seen. You mull the pockmarks, the pebbles, the rubber of blown tires–relics of less fortunate souls before you. You stop wondering who are all these people? and realize with a chill they are you.
T.J. drives with a kind of sixth sense. “The trick,” he tells me, “is to watch the jams without becoming part of them. So when we check out a car fire it’s from the far side of the Edens. Later, without explanation, he pulls off onto an access road. A half-mile later the reason is clear–brake lights and the seeds of a jam. T.J. knows alternate routes to his alternate routes. The Chicagoland road atlas that sits in the backseat with the first-aid kit appears more a decoration than a necessity as we calmly proceed one step ahead of the hapless commuter. But finally the city conspires to trap us behind a “most untimely” coal train, drawing from T.J. the confession, “No question, you definitely get headaches out here.”
The predilection for travel times begs a question: “How much of a disaster is traffic really?” Traffic reports are a distinctly modern craving, driven by a racing metabolism. While fast food gets faster (e.g. Taco Bell express) and an electric superhighway shrinks the world of information, our roads to exurbia carry people increasing distances from home to work. Accustomed to concision, conditioned to accept CNN’s headlines as news and MTV’s cuts as transitions, we have developed a certain impatience. So it’s not surprising that being stuck on the Stevenson in the dog days of summer inhaling the aroma of hot asphalt feels like a jail sentence; we reach out to the omniscient traffic service for deliverance.
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In the afternoon T.J. works here at headquarters “editing traffic” at a packed control panel. There’s barely room for coffee cups alongside the keyboards, computer screens, radios, and speakers that crowd the small area by a window that looks onto the Hancock’s observation deck. T.J. and two colleagues sit here in a state of heightened sensory awareness, pulling all the information together and entering it into IBM computers. “Poor bastards” mutters one, checking a screen displaying numbers from the sensors on I-90. “EBNWT DEV$>DPO DU 2 ACCI 2LL AT DPO :KENNX>BARR 45,” T.J. types. “JAKED,” he adds, his notation for “extra repulsive traffic.” The shorthand shows up on computer screens in surrounding rooms where reporters read traffic to some 66 local radio stations. Crammed for space at this altitude, Jeanne McClure reports for gospel station WWHN (“And now, with the Lord’s traffic . . . “) from a tiny adjacent kitchen that doubles as a studio. Perched on a patio chair, she leans forward to the mike and translates the scrambled text from the screen. “A mess on the Northwest Tollway eastbound from the Devon toll plaza to the Des Plaines oasis due to an accident with injuries in the two left lanes from the Kennedy to Barrington Road it’s 45 minutes,” she says without a breath.
The Minutemen are the self-proclaimed “guardians of the roadway.” The manager I talked to had that smugness you might expect to find in a surgeon. In a sense they are the physicians of the roads–specialists charged with the single task of unclogging the forever hardening urban arteries. The center boasts a 10-to-12-minute response time to road emergencies. The voice of Hunter S. Thompson was loud in my head, urging me to put the claim to the test: to grab a kitchen timer and put on the brakes during rush hour. Nah.
Early traffic theory cast individuals on the road as particles in a fluid. It was an approach similar to the early Adam Smith days of economic theory that assumed the market was composed of rational, informed individuals who acted to maximize their own “utility function.” Since “rational” and “informed” are probably the last words you would use to describe the average commuter, attempts to model traffic using the equations of hydrodynamics soon ran aground; while fluid flow successfully described the basic features of merging traffic, it stumbled over complications like the gaper’s delay. Just as economists started to incorporate human nature into their calculations, later traffic-modeling theories, such as Car Following Theory and Queuing Theory, tried to incorporate driver behavior and driver strategy and account for the fact that “how one person drives affects how everyone else drives.” Thus the field moved beyond its early antihumanism, upgrading drivers from unthinking particles to individuals with agendas (and car phones, and tempers, and fast food banquets spread out on the dashboard). Today there is no grand unified theory of traffic, the experts told me, just mathematical mock-ups of human behavior. When you’re out there ask yourself, “Am I a particle or sentient?”
