The traffic on my commute is moderately inconsistent. Some days I crawl along the roadways in a steady stream of vehicles, locked into a speed and place like a segment of a centipede. Other rush hours, the roads are eerily wanting of cars, and I wonder what happened to the herd. Is everyone working late, or did they leave early? I feel like a fool either way as I slip around the highway, luxuriating in the space like a muumuu.
Traffic affects me emotionally. I was a confirmed pedestrian for ten years; to transition from walking everywhere to a one-hour daily car commute required a paradigm shift that my brain has yet to accept. I don’t look at other cars and see disembodied cars; I see people who are driving cars. And when someone tailgates me mercilessly, or pulls out in front of me, or doesn’t yield to me in a rotary, I feel personally affronted. Because behind the cloak of anonymity afforded by 2-10 tons of steel and rubber, there is a person — perhaps being rude, perhaps imperiling my life. Similar behavior by a fellow pedestrian on a sidewalk would be considered sociopathic.
Today at 6:15pm, I was driving home from work in relatively light traffic. I pulled off the highway and hit a bottleneck of two lanes merging into one lane in stop-and-go traffic. Everyone knows the protocol for this scenario: the lanes join together like a zipper, one car from the left lane, one car from the right lane, etc. Because that’s one of the hundreds of little societal rules that just makes sense. So I was in the right lane, preparing to merge into the left lane behind a Toyota Corolla (thank God behind it, right?) but the Jeep Cherokee beside me wasn’t relinquishing any space for my car. With each inch of traffic, the lanes converged and I stubbornly tried to assert my rightful place behind the Corolla. The Jeep and I were quite close to rubbing up against each other, and I wanted to yell out my window, “What’s wrong with you, sociopath? Merge like a zipper!”
The Jeep finally yielded to me, probably because my car was positioned one foot in front of the Jeep, thus making him legally liable for any vehicular contact. He rode my ass for 2 miles of pure gridlock, and when the lanes divided he roared past me, accelerating furiously towards a red light. “Don’t take it personally,” I counsel myself like a crazy person. “He doesn’t know you. He just drives like a douche. What a douche.”
There is no traffic in car commercials. It is just one car, speeding down a road, barreling through the outdoors, or parked conveniently. It is one car, driving into emptiness.
