ODE TO THE ROAD

Night. Rain. Pavement squeegeed dry by tires of car ahead. NEW ENGLAND KEEP LEFT, chk-chk-chk from cars in opposite lanes, their headlights spaced out evenly by expert tailgating. Radio: "Hurricane Betsy is acting up again." Sensation of pleasant tension, smooth-pumping pistons, wiper-rhythm. WARNING SPEED CHECKED BY RADAR. Needle's right on 65. Cops make allowances. "Hey nonny nonny and a Ballantine beer." PAY TOLL AHEAD. Get out EXACT CHANGE. Hands resting lightly on wheel. "You don't believe--we're on the eve--of destruction." LINCOLN

AVE 2 MILES LINCOLN AVE 1 MILE LINCOLN AVE NEXT

RIGHT. Is it Dewey Threwey or Duway Thruway? Might as well edge up to 70. Everybody knows speedometers overread. NO BICYCLES OR PEDESTRIANS ALLOWED.

MANKIND takes pleasure in a certain amount of gloom.

When the talk turns to traffic, people love to speak bleakly of Gordian gluts that move like glaciers, of an ever-rising tide of blood on the roads, of a dark future in which cars multiply until they plate the nation's surface with two-ton steel locusts belching exhaust fumes that turn the sky shroud-grey. Any one man's traffic experience on a bad day can make it seem that the U.S. is well on its way to hell on wheels, that the nation faces an infinite problem. But a different experience, such as speeding through a rainy night on a broad new highway, might give a glimmer of a truer judgment: the strong and affluent U.S. can conquer traffic congestion--and is well along the road toward doing so.

The prime mover, so to speak, of traffic congestion is the U.S.'s explosive increase in motor vehicles, from 8,000 in 1900 to 90 million now. More pertinently, the car population has risen by almost 50 million since World War II, growing an average 5.7% a year while people increased by only 1.7%. Millions of families have bought their first car, or their first second car, or their first third car. Traffic engineers have been caught flat-tired. Great fleets of new cars will continue to cascade onto U.S. highways, but eventually, a point of saturation comes--probably at the ratio of one car for every person who can drive. Once the U.S. nears some realistic maximum volume of functioning cars on the road, growth of auto population will be tied to, and limited by the growth of human population. And building roads for this controlled total becomes a definable, if enormous job.

Wide Enough for a Corpse on a Cart

Mating the vehicle to the needs of man has been a challenge for a good many centuries. Around 700 B.C., Assyrian King Sennacherib undertook to keep chariots from parking along a main highway. ROYAL ROAD, LET NO MAN DECREASE IT, said the no-parking sign, and any man who decreased the road was soon deceased. Ancient Rome banned all women from driving chariots, and decreed that no one could drive near the Colosseum during the gladiator-baiting. Europe's early roads charged stiff tolls to pay for improvements, such as sufficient widening "to let a man pass with a dead corpse on a cart." The Romans, using heavy stones in layers, built a 50,000-mi. network of roads that wound through much of Europe and North Africa.

American colonists used Indian trails at first, eventually widened them and straightened them as part of a network of quagmire-pocked coach roads connecting major cities along the East Coast. Not until the late 1850s, when Congress appropriated $550,000 for three wagon roads, did anyone going West from the Mississippi River have anything but trackless prairies to drive on. From then on, road networks spread like spider webs across the U.S. In 1904 the U.S. Office of Road Inquiry took a national highway census that showed 2,000,000 miles of roads, just 250 miles of them paved.

These were the times that Professor Harmer Davis, transportation expert at the University of California, calls the period of caveat viator--let the traveler beware. With the '20s came the concept of traffic engineering, which finally adapted the carriage road of history to the internal-combustion car, providing gradual curves, smooth surfaces, low grades, road markers--and some helpful innovations. One was the parkway, which was born along the Bronx River in New York's Westchester County in 1922 and pioneered the principle of separated opposing lanes. Another was the cloverleaf, the essential invention that lets traffic on two divided highways cross and merge in all possible directional combinations without interrupting flow; the first was built at Woodbridge, N.J., in 1928.

The third phase of U.S. road history is the present period of making the road fit the environment. Land use, the natural setting, social conditions and human psychology are its concerns. It acknowledges that the private car is and for scores of years will be the most used form of transportation. Its expression is the U.S. Interstate Highway system, and its symbol is the red, white and blue shield that seems to say, "Heave a sigh of relief and get moving."

Gentle Grades & Artful Curves

These great Roman roads of today combine half a dozen principles to achieve a qualitative advance over any earlier road system, or any foreign system. The freeway's wide median strip virtually abolishes head-on collisions and headlight glare. Passing is made so easy that one four-lane freeway can carry about ten times as many cars as two two-way roads. Freeway cloverleafs eliminate the need for intersection stopping; limited access banishes blind entrances and overly frequent inflows of traffic. Gentle grades, ample widths and curves of an easy mathematical beauty let drivers see at least twice as far ahead as the distance they might need--even at the engineered 70 m.p.h.--to come to a stop. The same curves, plus the swirling cloverleafs, give much of the system a pre-Raphaelite art and grace.

This project--at once the biggest public work of all history and the source of many a state's worst corruption scandal--undertakes to tie together every city of 50,000 or more in the U.S. When finished, it will total only 41,000 miles of the nation's 3,600,000 miles of road, but will carry more than 20% of all traffic. It is a bit less than half complete, and to travel it now is to see the ideal when one is on some freshly built stretch with not a car in sight, and the obsolete when the sign says FREEWAY ENDS and the car is dumped onto a truck-jammed road bearing the telltale black-and-white shield that identifies the old federal-aid highway system. Interstate 40, for example, turns into Route 66, once famed in song and legend, and now a dreary bore lined with signs like SEE GILA MONSTERS 1 MILE.

The building costs for these broad, eight-to 36-in.-thick roads average $1,141,000 per mile. Columbia Professor William Vickrey says that the "subsidy" on some expressways is as much as 10-c- per car-mile, roughly equal to the vehicle's operating cost. On balance, however, the motorist saves big sums in reduced operating and accident costs, saved time and lessened strain. The road-building money is extracted from the motorist himself, in taxes on fuel, tires, accessories and truck weight. In the Interstate system, which is supposed to cost $46.8 billion by the time it is finished in 1972, the Federal Government pays 90% of the cost and the local governments chip in 10%. Once the road is built, local taxes must pay the whole tab for maintenance--and this year maintaining old roads is costing no less than a third as much as building new ones. "It's like giving a Cadillac to a guy making $1,000 a year and saying 'O.K., you take care of it,' " says one traffic man.

The good roads also have a cost in monotony. The antiseptic highway stretches on and on and on. The green-and-white signs are the same. The little clusters of commerce-at-the-cloverleaf are eminently the same. Even the jargon on the menus of the identical restaurants ("char-broiled steak smothered in mushrooms sauteed in fresh country butter") is the same. Yet, happily enough, as the freeway driver highballs from one similar place to another, leisurely and nostalgic souls who want to sample the color and culture of America's side roads can do so readily.

Invariably, another kind of nostalgia rears up whenever new freeways are about to be carved into the countryside--the sensation that Nature is being suffocated beneath spans of concrete. "In many parts of the country the building of a highway has about the same results upon vegetation and human structures as the passage of a tornado or the blast of an atom bomb," protests Critic Lewis Mumford, one of the foremost save-our-trees esthetes. In San Francisco, Folk Singer Malvina Reynolds became so angry with the California Highway Department that she wrote a song:

There's a cement octopus sits in Sacramento, I think

Gets red tape to eat, gasoline taxes to drink

And it grows by day and it grows by night

And it rolls over everything in sight.

Oh, stand by me and protect that tree

From the freeway misery.

Downtown Headaches

Broad, open and breezy as the superhighway may be out in the country, it often hits trouble at the city limits. The name of the trouble is "downtown." Where cities prize the idea of a distinct center, or where they are locked into it by topography, as in New York City or San Francisco, the congestion of building at the center vastly increases the difficulty of applying the principles--divided lanes, cloverleafs --of the expressway. Where cities have ample room and are indifferent to the idea of "downtown," expressways can be shaped in belts, loops and spokelike patterns that solve most traffic problems. Houston is one such city, and it smugly considers its traffic headaches to be negligible.

In truly congested cities, the expanses of concrete built to unclog traffic are often jammed almost from the moment they open. The Long Island Expressway, designed for 80,000 by 1970, now carries up to 170,000 a day; and the Hollywood Freeway, intended for 120,000 by 1970, now conveys nearly twice that many. "This is the only business where, if you have record crowds the first day, you consider it a failure," says Chicago's Project Supervisor Patrick J. Athol. To technophobes, this proves the futility of building roads--but that is something like not building schools to keep children from being born.

The traffic-jam trauma is under attack. For example, Detroit's John C. Lodge Expressway is testing an ingenious control system. Fourteen TV cameras, mounted on bridges over a particularly congested three-mile stretch, transmit pictures of cars to a 14-screen big-brother console near by. Technicians at the console can zoom in their lenses for closeup shots of any single suspicious vehicle; on several occasions they have watched on television while a smashup or a breakdown occurs. Then they call a policeman and throw switches that change speed-limit signs, block ramps, and turn on big red X signs over the lane that is blocked.

Even without such futuristic paraphernalia, city traffic in most places is moving better than it ever has. Driving time from one distant suburb into downtown Houston averaged 26.7 minutes during peak hours in 1960, now takes just 17.7 minutes. Los Angeles has a last laugh too: in 1957 a survey showed that peak-hour speeds on all freeways and streets averaged 24 m.p.h.; last year the average was up to 31 m.p.h.--not grand prix, but better than most mass transit.

Meanwhile New York, bastion of the crawling car and the double-parked truck, is only coping. Traffic Commissioner Henry A. Barnes has seen to it that Manhattan's major north-south streets are going--or will go--one way, and traffic has speeded up about 30%. Last week Barnes finally got permission to begin installing a $100 million system of traffic lights that will get their cues from what sensor-sent messages tell a computer about the flow of traffic.

For all but a dozen or so of the U.S.'s 224 cities of over 50,000 population, the answer to the traffic problem is clear: more expressways. As E. H. Holmes, planning director of the U.S. Bureau of Roads, says, "Congestion isn't peaking up any more; it's spreading." Little more than 5% of all metropolitan traffic in most cities is bound for the downtown area; most of it is skirting the city. And for such as New York and San Francisco, the answer lies mainly in more mass transit facilities (although New York is preparing to build a 2.5-mile Lower Manhattan crosstown expressway; estimated cost: $100 million a mile). In San Francisco, where the city board of planners have refused since 1958 to allow any freeways to be built, the 75-mile Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) automated system of trains running at 90-sec. intervals is to be completed in 1971. Cost: $13 million a mile.

But the question there, as well as in any other city that tries to woo motorized commuters away from their cars, is whether anybody wants to make the switch. Thousands of drivers enjoy not being tied to the unyielding timetable and the often inconvenient station locations of the railroad. Said one New York commuter last week, as he waited immobile (and alone, as do 70% of New York's commuting drivers) in traffic: "The train's part of the city. My car's a part of home."

Toothless Laws

Of all the problems--solvable or not--that U.S. traffic has generated, none is worse than the shameful web of immorality and ineptness that has come to entangle the enforcement and the court procedures of traffic laws. Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White last month startled a meeting of state bar association presidents in Miami with a stinging attack on traffic courts.

"If the 30 million violators each year are to mend their ways," said White, "it is wholly clear that we cannot tolerate the fix, that we cannot run traffic courts for revenue rather than for the purpose of influencing behavior, that serious violators must face judges. Their procedures should be upgraded and modernized to dispense justice on the one hand and to have the desired impact on the violator on the other hand."

Twenty-five states still allow the fee system in their traffic courts--meaning that the "judge," who might be a grocer, a barber, or even the local beauty-shop operator, is paid from the proceeds of fines. Some have been known to make $20,000 a year dispensing justice. The laws themselves are often unfair--or unenforceable. Speed limits that are set too low allow an officer to pick and choose when he should arrest someone. One of the greatest bluffs in U.S. traffic law is the New York City parking ordinance. Stern-looking green tickets, carrying a $15 fine, are issued by the hip-pocketful every day. At the moment, there are more than 900,000 outstanding tickets that have not been paid. The reason: before the clerk of court will issue a warrant for the car owner's arrest, he must have positive evidence that the owner himself parked the car.

A toothless traffic regulation like that invites disrespect for law and congestion in the streets. More to the point, it shows that many a traffic problem has a simple cure: change the law. Similarly, though critics contend that there is a kind of Parkingson's Law that causes any new car-stowing garage to overfill the instant it opens, many cities are making room for autos by insisting that new apartment houses and office structures have built-in parking space.

Solutions are even easier to find in the concrete-and-steel side of traffic handling: proven highway-building techniques are commonplace, and Washington has plenty of money. There will always be the time, of course, when 100,000 fatheads choose to clog the airport road just as some hapless chap leaves late to catch his plane; the traffic snarl can never be utterly banished. But in any pragmatic sense, the word for the traffic problem is: finite.

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