VISUAL CULTURE
Come Together
Sandy McCreery; 2002; ‘Come Together’; in Autopia: Cars and Culture; edited by Peter Wollen & Joe Kerr; Reaktion; London; pp. 307-311; ISBN 1-86189-132-6.
Come Together
Since nineteenth-century commentators devised body metaphors that described primary city routes as arteries, traffic congestion has been seen as an urban disease. It is a condition that planners, architects and governments have consistently sought to overcome, and that still taxes the ingenuity of city administrators. In cities of the Far Eastern ‘tiger economies’, they have banned non-motorized vehicles, while in various European cities they have selectively banned motorised ones. In London, the new mayor is committed to introducing congestion charging.
These are all policies that should prove popular; no-one it seems, has a good word to say for congestion. It brings delays, frustration, pollution, and financial costs. For many it epitomises all that is wrong with unregulated, unplanned, privatised, free-market economies – they never had congestion in the Soviet Union. It has to be sorted. British vox-pop TV documentaries feature tradesmen in white vans cursing the congestion caused by the school-run, while well-spoken mothers complain of intimidation by an aggressive new breed of driver: so-called ‘white van man’. None of those interviewed, they admit, know the answer, but somehow it just has to be sorted. In Joel Schumacher’s 1992 film Falling Down, a demented Michael Douglas finally cracks under the stresses of modern American life – in a traffic jam. The heat, the fumes, the flies and the sweat all accentuate the fact that he is suffocating. He has to get away, breathe again, decongest his tubes, empty his barrels. And in a similar vein, Jean Luc Godard’s 1968 critique of consumerism run wild, Weekend, consistently repeats one particularly telling scenario – life (and death) in a traffic jam. Following one gruesome pile-up an hysterical woman runs back to the carnage, not to help the dying, but to rescue her beloved Hermés handbag. Congestion – it’s the bane of modern life, yet no more than we apparently deserve. The manifestation of our self-obsessed, commodity-obsessed stupidity. Radical action is required.
The scenes of rage regularly witnessed by city dwellers indicate that all is not well on the roads. To describe congestion as a disease is not entirely metaphorical – we seem to be surrounded by an advancing social psychosis. And if congestion is making many of us demented, to suggest that nothing should be done to cure it is surely the opinion of a bad casualty. Certainly not the voice of reason. Yet could it be that the conventional diagnoses are wrong? Might it be that traffic congestion is not a symptom of urban disease, even less a sign of social meltdown, but rather a mark of robust urban health? Just as physicians no longer advocate bleeding, nor seek to stimulate the flow of the humours, perhaps traffic congestion is another aspect of circulation that is best left well alone. Before dismissing the possibility, just try thinking of a decent world city that is not regularly gripped by gridlock. We might find it instructive to consider the alternatives.
Let’s state it plainly: congestion is slow moving traffic. Nothing more complicated than that, although it is worth noting the discriminatory definition of ‘traffic’ which is generally applied only to motor traffic (twenty cars waiting at traffic lights are apparently an indication of traffic congestion, whereas twenty pedestrians waiting to cross the same road are not). So in extremis, we are left with two alternatives: either fast moving motor traffic or no motor traffic. In practice, of course, these are often two sides of the same coin, as fewer vehicles have the room in which to travel faster. But is either situation actually any better than congestion? We can consider each in turn.
The speeding up of urban traffic dominated the minds of planners and city administrators throughout most of the last century. The visions of Le Corbusier, and the brutal realities of Robert Moses’s New York highways are only the two most widely known cases in point. When Frederick Etchells translated Le Corbusier’s assertion as ‘A city made for speed is made for success,’ he was probably unaware of the tautology. The etymological route of speed is from the Old English spówan (Old High German spuon): to succeed or prosper. And the intimate connection between the two notions still appears logical in many circles – on the whole a successful economy or business is one in which money circulates, and profits accrue, rapidly. However, whereas money is an abstract, and increasingly amorphous, concept, cars unfortunately are not. Allowing hard, heavy, speeding vehicles to come into contact with fleshy mortals is a recipe for disaster, and limiting the death toll has consistently dominated the minds of planners. The approach of Modernists such as Le Corbusier and Moses was to engineer new types of urban road on which only motor vehicles would be permitted, but there are obvious limits to how far this process can proceed. Not only is the cost prohibitive, both in terms of money and destruction, but there are people inside those vehicles, heading to a place where they will want to get out, walk about, stay alive. Thus, the structures and experiences of a full-blown Modernist approach, although undeniably exhilarating, were only ever likely to occur intermittently.
Instead, in cities around the world, ways were sought to enable speeding motorists and vulnerable non-motorists to co-exist largely on existing street patterns. It has proved a tortuous exercise, and one predicated on a notion of ‘reasonable’ compromise; that it must surely be possible to allow motorists to enjoy reasonable speed while affording pedestrians a reasonable chance of survival. The facts are that following 20-mph impacts, roughly 95% of pedestrians survive, while at 40 mph, only 15% survive. And as you might expect, since 1934 Britain has had a speed limit in built-up areas of 30 mph. Most countries around the world have a similar limit . It is, apparently, reasonable. And in this mood of give-and-take pedestrians have been contained and controlled, apparently for their own good. Trying to walk through many urban areas has become a pinball experience of pedestrian barriers, bollards, street signage, constricted pavements, walk-don’t walk signs, pedestrian underpasses, overpasses and jay-walking restrictions. This is the price extracted from pedestrians, and in return, motorists kill and seriously injure fewer people – only 6,273 in London in a typical year, for example. In almost every city in the world, the violence inflicted on human beings by motor vehicles far outstrips that of crime. Not much of a deal.
And then there have been the other costs associated with trying to manage the competing claims of speed and safety, in particular those of the ‘experts’ – the arbitrators, designers and engineers of the so-called solutions – the countless research institutions, university departments, engineers, planners, systems analysts, etc., all apparently dedicated to finding better means for managing motor traffic. Plus the costs of installing and operating their solutions; the one-way systems, tidal-flow roads, urban clearways, gyratories, underpasses, overpasses, eyes-in-the-sky, traffic lights, parking restrictions, speed cameras etc. Few would deny that somewhere in their heads was the kernel of that modernist vision, flashing taillights on elevated freeways, but the tabula rasa was mythical. These were real cities and real people’s lives that had to be devastated before they could be rebuilt. And despite all of this physical and mental exertion, average road-journey times in London have famously remained unchanged for a century. Oh no, could it be that traffic flow is largely a self-regulating system, that these interventions are pointless? Engineer larger roads for higher speeds and in no time you will find them choked with new cars, making new journeys. Speeds return to previous levels. Congestion is no pushover. Perhaps the pinnacle of underachievement has been the one-way systems. These have achieved the holy grail of a sustainable increase in vehicle speed, an increase almost precisely matched by the increased distance that has to be travelled to get through the system. Brilliant. Those academicians of road science were resembling bleeding eighteenth century physicians!
In fairness, many traffic engineers now accept that you will never sustainably speed up urban traffic flow by expanding road capacity, and in many quarters the approach has shifted from accommodating speeding motor vehicles to discouraging them. Yet had it proved feasible to speed up vehicles in cities, would it even have been desirable? Presumably, we’ve all come across those isolated urban roads on which the traffic flows rapidly (often stretches beyond the last hold up, behind which the traffic crowd remains stuck) and experienced the uniform desolation of such areas. The noise, the threat, the filth, the absence of street life, the human and commercial casualties. J G Ballard’s Concrete Island depicts life in such an environment taken to its extreme; cowering, non-motorized individuals scratch a primitive survival among the ruins left by highway engineers whilst oblivious drivers continue by. There’s nowhere to stop. This is non-place, transit space. And if we want to see to a real-world example of the free-flowing built-up area, we can look to the new American sprawls such as Dallas-Fort Worth. There no one in their right mind would think of venturing anywhere except by motor vehicle. Cars can speed along without killing people too many people because there are next to no people, no street life. This is not a city in any meaningful sense. If you really wish to tackle congestion by getting urban traffic flowing rapidly, and you don’t want carnage on the street, then you must kill the street. Not a great option.
The other approach, the one currently finding more favour in most European cities, is to restrict motor vehicles entering city centres. Without parallel measures to slow down the remaining vehicles, speeds will increase, and indeed this is main intention of many restriction policies. The congestion charging about to introduced in London is a misnomer; it is speed that drivers will be paying for, and with it will come increased danger, severance and blight. If urban traffic speeds increase, and other conditions remain unchanged, more people die, simple as that. Thus the sophisticated approach is to restrict both the number of motor vehicles and their potential speed. This is the approach found in cities such as Amsterdam, and in many smaller towns throughout northern Europe, including Cambridge, Bath and York in the UK. It is eminently sensible, and disturbingly dull. It produces cities that are pretty and precious. Tidy, prescriptive, vegetarian cities devoid of the glamour, excess, and public egos that make major cities exciting. That make them, and consequently us, feel big. These tend to be sanctimonious, self-denying and painfully polite tourist cities which, perhaps unsurprisingly, are often associated with places of learning and ‘culture’. They have all the guts and sincerity of The Truman Show. There’s less accidental death in such places, but then there’s less life. Clearly removing congestion removes something more from the city than just a few delays.
It is time to reassess congestion in a rather more positive light. Congestion is slow-moving traffic. In cities, it is good because slow moving motor traffic is better than fast-moving motor traffic. It is also good because living with cars is more fun than living without them. Cars are big toys, and they should make us happy. This is worth repeating only because many people appear to have lost sight of it. When those auto-pioneers were seeking to spark life into their machines, they were not feverishly imagining their creations carrying frustrated commuters from a boring job to some bland home. There were no advertisements that claimed ‘buy this, it’ll make your life really fucking dull.’ Cars are dream machines, always have been, that allow us to transcend our everyday lives and surroundings. And just like their narcotic equivalents, it is when we let them become part of our everyday lives that problems begin. Congestion is the great moderator. It forces us to confront the consequences of dependency. Sure there are those too weak, foolish or emotionally insecure to do anything about it, but most take control and moderate the auto habit. Enjoy a drive, enjoy the enjoyment, and make sure it stays that way.
And when indulging in the pleasures of motoring we would do well to remember the madness of it all. A car is not primarily a tool. It is not for undertaking tasks. Almost all motoring journeys were simply not made before the inception of the car. They were not originally undertaken due to some pre-existing need, but in order to explore the possibilities; playful possibilities. And consider the manner in which they are made. Driving is not dissimilar to watching television from a comfortable seat at home. There is the screen, a controlled environment, personal audio, interactive technology, soft upholstery and that comforting sense of privacy. Indeed an average sofa is of similar width to a car. In our motorized world we effectively roll our sofas out in to the street (together with the all the other home entertainment paraphernalia), and propel them forwards at 30 mph. Picture that – is it reasonable to expect that no-one should get in our way (not that there is anything reasonable about the whole surreal business – just what planet were those planners on?)? And why, in the midst of such excessive indulgence, would anyone want to rush? This is surely a transport of delights.
By its very nature, congestion is a shared experience, the urban crowd of the automotive era. Its etymology is from the Latin congero, ‘to bring together’. This is not an urban disease, but what cities are all about, their very essence. And just as the crowd was celebrated as the apogee of the urban condition (while simultaneously feared by the powerful), so it could be with congestion. It exists because there is somewhere worth going to, or being in, together – the city. And that somewhere ceases to exist if congestion is ever eradicated. In Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full, there is a scene in which the Black youth of Atlanta create gridlock on their way to Freak-nic. Yet this is not a cause for frustration, but part of their celebration. They climb out of their cars, pump up the volume and flaunt themselves – their Blackness, sexiness, togetherness – in the faces of the horrified White patricians staring down from one of their privileged private clubs. The kids’ dancing challenges the most basic social and mental categories through which power operates: reason, separation, circulation and progress. This is not rational, not in the right place, not going anywhere, and things don’t come much better. It is a very literal return of the repressed. A triumph of the human over the system. Then again, congestion is the triumph of the human over the system.
And perhaps the most human attribute that congestion encourages is thought. Even snarl-ups themselves raise philosophical questions – it is surely a willed downfall of Nietzschean proportions to have humans imprisoned in their escape machines. But, thinking less introspectively, it is clear that the very slowness of congestion affords us time to contemplate our surroundings – to dwell upon them in a way that is impossible when speeding through them. City-centre congestion is seldom dull. The comings and goings, repulsions, attractions, emotions, expressions, fashions and bodies offer flânerie of the highest calibre. And it is worth remembering that this is only feasible because of the congestion – such street life would not exist, does not exist, in situations where motor traffic is racing by. Sat in your car, you really are part and parcel of the pageant. That again is worth thinking about. And if you’re sat in an appealing car, chances are everyone else will be taking notice of you too. It is a similar kind of mutual consideration, a taking notice, that is acted out in slow-moving funeral processions. Slowness allows the world to dwell upon the deceased, whilst the mourners can contemplate an emptier world. And it is thoughtful communication, born out of slowness, that features in a closing scene of the 1953 film Genevieve. Two veteran cars have been cynically raced from Brighton to London. They are side by side at a red traffic light, moments from the finish line, when an elderly gentleman strikes up a conversation with one of the drivers. He has recognised the model of car, it was his first, the one in which he courted his future wife, and his memories are flooding back. As the lights go green the driver must either continue with the race, or with his new acquaintance. Momentarily, he is torn, until with gallant resignation, with an emphatic adherence to human values, he steps out of the race to embrace his new friendship. He would be glad to take the elderly couple out for a spin. The shared joy is palpable.
Congestion. It takes us out of the race. Allows thoughtful communication. It can be a beautiful thing.
(c) Sandy McCreery