Everyone believes, or some believe, or a few believe (broad generalizations are a bad habit; most propositions beginning with "all" are little more than tautologies) the urban legend that the world's freeways are derived from a design first inspired by the Romans. The logic is this: Since it takes a horse or ox to pull a chariot or a wagon, the width of a horse or ox is a determining factor in the width of the wagon. And since most wagons have wheels, the length of the axle and the corresponding distance between the wheels is similarly determined by the width of the horse or ox. A one-way road will generally be at least one horse wide. A two-way road will be at least two horses wide. That is how the Romans decided the width of their roads. Standardized roads were a critical component of Rome's military mobility and supply-chain logistics. A Roman road is two horses, and then some, wide. It is also one wagon wide. The belief is that the distance between the rails of a train track is derived from the distance between the ruts in Roman roads designed to guide the wheels of a wagon and to keep the wagon from sliding off the road and into the mud and that the distance between automobile tires is, in its turn, tied to the distance between the train track's rails. This same imaginary history and archaeology of the automotive wheelbase drives the history and archaeology of the rush hour freeway. Just as it was necessary to have six or more charioteers stand side by side in the Flavian Amphitheater in Rome at the start of a race to maximize the cheers of the bread and circuses bunch, so too the six-lane freeways of the twenty-first century are modeled on the need to have six or more automobiles race side by side from home to work and back again to the cheers of their satellite radios and mp3 players. A wreath to the victor.
He is a deep psychologist, specifically a Jungian, where the psychology of commuting is concerned. His Self, his ectopsyche, comprised as it is of intuition, sensation, feeling and thinking, has provided him the means to understand and accept all the mythic forms or archetypes that manifest themselves on his journeys to and from work. He has seen all the archetypes at one time or another in his commuter dreams. He sees the anima, the animus and the shadow on a daily basis. He knows that other psychological models are possible and equally effective in explaining the seeming chaos that surrounds him each morning during peak hour traffic and that, although Jung's shadow archetype can be used to explain the emotional chaos that rises from the Styxian river of cars like a toxic cloud, conflict theory, a model derived as much from sociology as from social psychology, provides a better explanation of the weaving and cutting back and forth, speeding up and slowing down to prevent the person next to you from changing lanes or reaching an exit ramp in time, and high-speed tailgating to within a foot of one another that certain drivers seems to revel in. He sees them scream at each other through their windows. He sees them beat their steering wheels with the palms of their hands in rage. A friend once confided to him the mantra of the driver high on road rage. "It's not how fast I'm going, or where I'm going or why I'm going there. It's whether or not I'm in front of YOU!" When he inquired who "YOU" was his friend responded, "Everyone." Transportation planners are practical and always select operant conditioning as their primary behavioral model. To most transportation planners, a city's street system is a giant Skinner Box. On average, drivers will choose the shortest path in terms of time. Like rats exiting a burning building, they will stick with the crowd only as long as the crowd keeps moving. If things slow down too much, they leave the middle march and run to one side or the other, searching for an alternate escape route. If they find one, others will follow. If things don't work out, they eventually turn back in an effort to rejoin the mob.
He once read a book on transportation planning. To plan transportation, one has to know, first of all, where people sleep at night. Then you have to follow them throughout the day as they drive their cars, trucks and tractor trailer rigs from one place to another. Of all the things he learned, the thing that most surprised him was the application of gravity to the distribution of automobile trips to and from houses, apartment buildings, hotels, office buildings, schools, shopping malls, restaurants, hospitals, factories, football stadiums, theme parks and government offices. Newton's equation appears to work nearly as well in predicting the collective mayhem that we call "driving" as it does in predicting the movement of apples, projectiles and planets. Once the physical attraction between individuals and the places they wish to be is established, the next step is to place those individuals in vehicles on actual roads by time of day. The simplest way to do this is by measuring the time it takes to travel from one place to the next based on the volume of traffic at a point in space and time. As the traffic fills up the bigger streets and slows down, it flows over into the smaller streets until they fill up and slow down, and so forth and so on. Basically, you pour all the trips onto the street system in pretty much the same way you would pour plaster into the middle of a big flat intricate "Home Sweet Home" plaster mould.
He has been sitting at a dead stop for nearly fifteen minutes while up ahead of him something has brought the entire freeway to a standstill. Most likely it is an accident. It could also be a construction project or a new traffic management policy gone awry. It could be absolutely nothing at all. He has seen rush hour traffic brought to a halt by something as simple as a person standing on the shoulder of the freeway. He has stood in line for thirty minutes, bumper to bumper, inching his way forward for a mile or more only to reach the front row of the traffic jam and find . . . nothing, absolutely nothing that would impede the flow of automobiles. Before him lay a great and empty six-lane freeway with cars to his right and left leaping forward one at a time, like random subatomic particles passing through a particle detector with a beep, . . . beep, beep. And he, in a moment of hesitation at the confusion and wonder of it all, was in his turn motivated to punch the gas pedal and leap forward onto the blank, broad, minimalist concrete canvas of the world by the honking of a horn behind him and the imagined androgynous alto of an enraged motorist screaming, Get out of my way, you fucking moron!
