Why New Yorkers Cannot Drive

The denizens of New York City and vicinity, in general, do not know how to drive. I am not talking about those urban dwellers who don’t own cars and some of whom don’t even have driving licenses. Nor am I talking about immigrants who drive the way people do back in the third world. I mean native born New Yorkers with driving licenses, many of whom have been “driving” for decades. They drive very badly and create traffic jams unnecessarily. The further one gets from NYC, the better the people drive. By the time you get to Dutchess County where I live, you have some pretty decent drivers, the exception being folks who moved here from closer to NYC.

NYC drivers, as I will call them, are egregious tailgaters. This means an increased likelihood of otherwise avoidable accidents and delays and the phenomenon whereby traffic slows and speeds accordion fashion due to excessive braking. The latter can cause extensive delays for miles down the road for no reason other than the sheer incompetence of the drivers in front of you.

NYC drivers are incapable of merging appropriately onto a highway from an on ramp. In most places, a spontaneous order emerges in which traffic already on the road coordinates with merging traffic and leaves an appropriate space. Not so with NYC drivers. If I did not know that they were simply incapable of thinking beyond themselves, suffering as they do from a kind of vehicular autism, I would suspect that they were perversely interfering with the cars on the on ramp. This is the result of a lack of the kind of coordination found elsewhere in the country. And the drivers on the ramp are just as problematic. The driver in front of you on the ramp is likely to stop rather than adjusting speed and finding a way into traffic, in which case everyone on the ramp is screwed. This is probably because these drivers do not have any reason to trust that the drivers already in traffic will not interfere with them. This causes incredible delays on the highways and parkways wherever there is an on ramp.

In the same way, NYC drivers cannot efficiently handle a reduction in the number of lanes. The simple coordination required for this is entirely beyond their capabilities; therefore, any lane closure inevitably results in a traffic jam.

NYC drivers cannot efficiently get through a toll plaza. They will bunch up chaotically, not in any line or file, and block one another. Again, they cannot coordinate.

I have a theory to explain this. I used to attribute it to the overall relative bad manners of New Yorkers, but I have come to believe that their bad driving is an artifact of learning to drive and developing driving habits within the city. In the city, every movement is ostensibly controlled by road markers, traffic lights, barricades, cops out the wazoo, the need to avoid being hit by maniacal cab drivers, the need to avoid hitting suicidal delivery men and messengers on bikes, and the need to work around masses of pedestrians and jaywalkers. There is little opportunity for coordination within this complex environment, and any hesitation will be exploited by other drivers in a quest to keep moving. You can barely move in the city at all, and your movements are so highly regulated and constrained that there is little opportunity for any kind of collaborative effort among drivers. On the contrary, driving in the city is competitive, a jockeying for position constrained only by the inconvenience that ramming another vehicle or human being or being rammed would entail. NYC drivers simply do not learn the coordination skills necessary to drive on highways outside the city.

Contrast this to a place like Seattle where most of the intersections out of downtown are not even controlled. Traffic jams occur, due to roadwork and sheer volume of cars, but Seattleites are by and large well able to merge and coordinate among themselves on the roads. They have a well-developed awareness of what other cars and pedestrians are doing and an ability to anticipate. They yield to pedestrians, and they generally do not tailgate. There is a lot more freedom of movement for drivers in Seattle even downtown; therefore, they have the chance to learn to coordinate those movements. I suspect that they will lose these skills as the area becomes more congested.

Contrast this also to Los Angeles where the highways are full of cars all the time and yet, for much of the time traffic is moving at high speed. This can be a little scary for a country boy like myself, but I am always amazed at how easy it is to merge onto the highway compared to NY. Again, more freedom of movement translates to better skills at coordinating those movements.

The moral of the story is that if you give people freedom, they will work out how to exercise it just fine. If you are inexperienced with freedom, you may be retarded in its exercise.