Driving in rush hour traffic

Due to the capriciousness of automobiles, I've been forced to carpool this week. The direct consequence of this has been longer trips spent in the car, which in itself is a pain, especially since it's generally frowned upon for the driver to watch a DVD player while driving. I guess that makes sense.

But also it means more opportunities each day to engage in one of the most despised activities in the world: merging. I'm sure somewhere in the world there's a guy who likes merging, who's really good at it but he probably also likes other forms of self-torture like epilation and tax filing. Typically, I find merging to be worse in the evenings, maybe because of the lack of sunlight. Or likely it's the blinding glare of a million cars filled with tired drivers trying to get home all at the same time here in Nashville. Our traffic "won" a contest, you know.

I had mostly forgotten about merging before my car broke down -- when you're on your own schedule, you can time your comings and goings to whenever you want, you're at the mercy of no one. But carpooling is different and essentially begs an itinerary. Which means usually driving in the worst of traffic through parts of town no sane person would drive through (or rather, creep through) in rush hour. You're surrounded for 30 or 40 minutes by people doing everything they can to annoy you. So I can't help but think about Maroon Golf, the notorious car that continuously boxed in Jerry during the infamous (for other reasons) episode, The Puerto Rican Day.

There are moments in the middle of heavy traffic that I just want to cut in front of a neighboring car, that I want to tailgate or drive maniacally. Screw that guy, I'll blow right past him and never see him again. But that's not true, Maroon Golf comes back later in the episode: "Oh, look who's here. My old buddy, black Saab." Life has a way of folding back in on itself. It also comes as no surprise that merging evokes in me such a passionate response. For Tom Vanderbilt, merging acted as the genesis for writing Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do and he found an entire industry around the science and psychology of merging, "the most stressful activity single activity we face in everyday driving."

I know this. I feel this too when driving. This week I caught myself willing to go a longer route and come from a different direction if it meant eliminating the merge point or the dreaded turning-across-multiple-lanes-without-a-light move. I think it speaks to the innate distrust we have of our fellow drivers. And also to the fact that they tend to be in our way; seriously, if other drivers didn't exist, think of how quickly you could get home.

Will traffic in the future remove these problems? Probably not. I think that traffic, like Life, moves to the pace of something bigger than any of us individually. There will always be stress, there will always be Maroon Golfs. You'll get home when you get home, likely when the parade in front of you clears. How you cope with the traffic is what matters more.