November 26, 2002
Care to change lanes? ... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes".
Would you rather have a timepiece that runs a minute faster each and every hour, or one that is completely stopped? The most famous answer, in a comical confusion of logic, is that it is better to have a watch that's stopped, since at least it would be right twice a day.
While this observation was clearly offered before electronics made AM a different display from PM, the answer is: it's better to have the clock which runs a minute faster each hour, because you can always look at the clock and calculate the actual time.
You might say that the purpose of a clock is to enable you to figure out what time it is - not to present the exact time on its face.
The same might be said about man's relationship to automobiles and the roads they travel on. If you're driving a car, the purpose is to get there.
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I once spent several weeks in Buenos Aires, and each day I traveled from the center of the city to a facility just 5 miles away. I remember distinctly the very first trip. It was a sunny afternoon. The taxi wove through glorious boulevards, four lanes in each direction. We moved through parks, around grand marble statues of famous horse-mounted military men, their sabers reaching to the sky. It was both inspiring and breathtaking.
As the days went by, I made the trip at various hours of the day, from early in the morning commute through late in the commuter's day. And at any of these times, I might be traveling with the great bulk of traffic or against it.
I never again felt inspiration, but breathtaking - I definitely experienced a lot of breathtaking.
You see, sometimes, two lanes would be going in one direction, and six in the other. Or it would be the reverse. Or there might be five lanes in one direction and three in the other.
I searched for signs, telling me what times they made the switch, and I saw nothing.
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One day, we were driving against traffic, and an oncoming car pulled into our lane, heading straight for us. My taxi jerked one lane to the right, and just kept on going. As fast as that, all the lanes had changed. Another lane was outbound, and one less was coming in.
As my heart was beating out of my chest, I realized how it worked. As the traffic builds up, the cars simply appropriate another lane. And nobody blinks.
I actually thought of this experience fondly last week when I was sitting, stopped on a freeway. Almost no cars were coming from the other direction, and even more irritating, no one at all was traveling in the carpool lane to my left. We all sat there, parked on a freeway, burning fossil fuel, spewing hydrocarbons and gestating road rage.
I wondered what those Argentinian taxi drivers would make of this. Or worse, what would happen if these same highway planners got their mitts on the boulevards of Buenos Aires.
Just as clocks which run a minute faster each hour are a much better solution than clocks which don't run at all, fluidity always solves more problems than rigidity creates.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
