While driving to work, I have the "pleasure" of being stuck in traffic. This happens almost no matter when I come into work, be it 6:30 or 9:30 AM. I suppose this is not entirely unexpected; even though our fair city no longer is among the worst ten in the nation, it's still up there. This "pleasure" does give me time to think... and more often than not, I think about the nature of traffic.
I actually admire the job of a city planner quite a bit. There are so many things to think about: zoning, commercial development, how far people want to drive and so on. The problem of traffic is an extremely complex one. You want the roads to be effective at getting people from place to place, but you also want them to be fairly transparent. I think though, that city planners are frequently the cause of more traffic than they realize. Many times it will be because a stadium or some large structure is constructed in a not very freeway convenient place, and then the surface streets back up with unplanned for traffic and there you go. It doesn't even have to be an event; it could just be the every day commute. City planners almost never seem to be able to restrict development to the places to which development should be restricted and, as a result, big developments are created in locations that cannot handle the traffic.
However, this is only a small problem when it comes to the overall nature of traffic. My theory is that the majority of traffic is caused by bad drivers (of whom I am most certainly one). Look at Formula 1 race drivers or NASCAR. These drivers easily drive as close as the cars any traffic jam, yet they're able to travel at hundreds of miles an hour! While the quality of the cars and the nature of the track help, the majority of it is because they are GOOD drivers who have nothing else to do but drive. The problem with the standard commuter is that they do other things. Check the radio. Look at the view. Get uncomfortable when they're following the person in front of them too close. Get uncomfortable when it rains. Have something catch the corner of their eye. Take my average commute: I drive about thirty minutes a day, and in the middle of the commute, I cross across a bridge for a mile or so in the middle of Lake Washington. In the middle of the bridge, on a clear day, you can see Mount Rainer. When you can see it, it's a gorgeous sight (for those of you running Windows XP, I encourage you to look at the "Ascent" desktop picture... yep, that's Rainer and it really does look that good from the bridge on a good day). So you're cruising along at 60 miles an hour, and what happens? You see a gorgeous sight out the corner of your eye. And what do you do reflexively? Lighten your foot off the accelerator just a bit. This causes the person behind you to lighten their foot, and then the person behind them to get a little uncomfortable that they are getting to close and so on until you have traffic. That's all it took! One person slightly reacting to something and traffic precipitates out of the mix. Normally, the roads could handle this kind of slight variation, but when cars are packed closely together, traffic is the result.
This is how subtle the problem of traffic is. And because you certainly cannot legislate against or even identify the person who took their foot off the gas that early in the morning, it's impossible to get that variability out of the equation. One more reason that we need automatic drive cars that stay at constant speed no matter what appears in our periphery. That, or sending everyone to the Jeff Gordon school of driving.
