Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt Read Free Book Online Page A

an accomplice drive up on a scooter next to cars waiting at a traffic signal and stare at the driver of a neighboring car. These drivers roared through the intersection faster than those who were not stared at. Another study had a pedestrian stare at a driver waiting at the light. The result was the same. This is why trying to make eyes at your neighboring driver is bound to fail, and it is the larger problem with in-car dating networks like Flirting in Traffic, which allow drivers to send messages (via an anonymous e-mail to a MySpace-style Web site) to people bearing a special sticker. Most people—except middle-aged guys in Ferraris—do not want to be stared at while driving.
    When you need to do something like change lanes, however, eye contact is a key traffic signal. On television’s
Seinfeld,
Jerry Seinfeld was on to something when he advised George Costanza, who was waving his hand while trying to negotiate a difficult New York City merge, “I think we’re gonna need more than a hand. They have to see a human face.”
    Many studies have confirmed this: Eye contact greatly increases the chances of gaining cooperation in various experimental games (it worked for
Seinfeld
’s George, by the way). Curiously, the eyes do not even need to be
real.
One study showed that the presence of cartoon eyes on a computer screen made people give more money to another unseen player than when the eyes were not present. In another study, researchers put photographs of eyes above an “honor system” coffee machine in a university break room. The next week, they replaced it with a photograph of flowers. This cycle was repeated for a number of weeks. Consistently, more people made donations on “eye” weeks. The very design of our eyes, which contain more visible sclera, or “white,” than those of any of our closest primate relatives, may have even evolved, it has been argued, to facilitate cooperation in humans. This greater proportion of white helps us “catch someone’s eye,” and we’re particularly sensitive to the direction of one’s gaze. Infants will eagerly follow your glance upward but are less likely to follow if you close your eyes and simply tilt your head up. The eyes, one might argue, help reveal what we would like; eye contact is also a tacit admission that we do not think we will be harmed or exploited if we disclose our intentions.
    There are times when we do not want to signal our intentions. This is why some poker players wear sunglasses. It also helps explain another game: driving in Mexico City. The ferocity of Mexico City traffic is revealed by the
topes,
or speed bumps, that are scattered throughout the capital like the mysterious earthen mounds of an ancient civilization. Mexico City’s speed bumps may be the largest in the world, and in their sheer size they are bluntly effective at curbing the worst impulses of
chilango
(as the capital’s residents are known) motorists. Woe to the driver who hits one at anything but the most glacial creep. Older cars have been known to stall out at a bump’s crest and be turned into a roadside food stand.
    Topes
are hardly the only traffic hazard in Mexico City. There are the
secuestros express,
or “express kidnappings,” in which, typically, a driver stopped at a light will be taken, at gunpoint, to an ATM and forced to withdraw cash. Often the would-be criminal is more nervous than the victim, says Mario González Román, a former security official with the U.S. embassy and himself a kidnapping victim. Calmness is essential. “Most of the people dead in carjackings are people that send the wrong signal to the criminal,” he explained while driving the streets of the capital in his 1976 Volkswagen Beetle (known as a
vocho
). “You have to facilitate the work of the criminal. If the car is all he wants, you are lucky.”
    Express kidnappings, thankfully, are fairly rare in Mexico City. The more common bane of driving in the Distrito Federal is the endless