The people who live and drive in the city of Los Angeles
I’ve dealt with traffic before. Like, pretty much every day, since I live in LA. It doesn’t make it any easier to cope with the blatant stupidity and flagrant breaking of Wheaton’s Rule (don’t be a dick), though.
There was a section of David Foster Wallace’s just-released book The Pale King that described in minute detail a certain type of traffic-related human stupidity that I had to deal with just earlier today. It occurred on the single-lane interchange between the 405-South and the 101-North. When he describes it so completely and so simply, it seems like DFW is tapping into some normally inaccessible thought frequency that reveals the truth of it. However, it is difficult to understand why people continue to do it anyway.
From The Pale King:
Moreover, the closer we came to the metro Peoria’s southeast side and the special access road to the Examination Center, the worse the traffic became. … since traffic jams often bring out the most aggressive me-first elements of the human makeup and cause behavior that itself, perversely, exacerbates the traffic jam — this right here perhaps being the place to mention a behavior that we began seeing more and more of as we inched closer to the REC turnoff. Certain private vehicles in our lane veered rightward into the narrow gravel “breakdown lane,” in which they sped up and were able to pass dozens of other vehicles, illegally, which in and of itself would not have been a big deal except for the fact that as the REC turnoff approached and the breakdown lane began to narrow and disappear they then sought to merge left back into the legal seingle lane, which required someone in that lane to stop and let them in again, which further clotted traffic in the regular lane…meaning that the selfish, me-first vehicles were significantly worsening the very jam that they’d sought to bypass; they gained an extra couple of minutes by making the jam and delay slightly worse for everyone else in the shimmering line of cars in our lane. (p.270-273)
This happened so frequently that at one point there was a line of cars waiting to get into the actual lane, as if the phantom lane they had created had become a real thing. And at one point, the driver of some super-sized long-haul truck decided he needed to shave like eight seconds off his trip and cause the rest of us five minutes of extra traffic time.
