Traffic Life : Passionate Tales and Exit Strategies
Edited by Stephan Wehner
An Anthology
 
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Documentation: The Right Of Way Manifesto Right Of Way Poe's story 'The Purloined Letter' turns on the idea that sometimes the best way to hide something is to leave it in plain sight. The idea is amply illustrated for New Yorkers by two glaring scandals that can be seen in action, any day, on any streetcorner, by anybody who ventures outside his house: There's an unacknowledged crime wave of lawless be- havior by drivers-a crime wave that takes the lives of 250 or so New Yorkers every year. In a gigantic theft of public property, the car-owning minority of New Yorkers has stolen the streets from the non-motorized rest of us. ­ 162 ­
  
Right of Way 163 Thugarchy, the Rule of the Road Stand at a busy streetcorner in midtown any weekday morn- ing and just watch what happens. You'll see a dozen dan- gerous crimes a minute: drivers 'squeezing' the light or just plain ignoring it, drivers bullying pedestrians out of the crosswalk in a very lopsided game of 'chicken,' drivers stomping on their accelerators and peeling out of a stalled lane into another that offers an irresistible ten feet of Open Road, only to shudder to a squealing stop half a second later. Enforcement is essentially nonexistent: when was the last time you saw, or heard of, a driver being ticketed for not yielding the right-of-way to a pedestrian? Or for reckless driving after forcing a cyclist off the road? It just doesn't happen. Speed limits, of course, are a standing joke; most drivers in New York couldn't even tell you what the speed limit is. Whenever there's an opportunity for drivers to open it up and make time, God help the carless. And quite apart from the nominal limit, the concept of 'reckless driving' simply has no meaning at all to drivers and police alike: cars roar down narrow side streets at thirty miles an hour, desperate to make a light; they may, by chance, be under the limit, but they're way above what is safe and prudent. Obviously, nobody cares: not the Mayor, not the cops, not the District Attorneys. The police have an informal, though freely acknowledged, rule that a driver who kills a pedestrian has to be violating at least two laws before he'll be charged with anything. So the vast majority of killer drivers roll away from the scene of the crime without even any points on their license. Not only do the authorities not care, but most New York- ers simply accept these conditions, without indignation, as an inescapable fact of life; the Purloined Letter principle at work. But this tyranny of motorized criminals is not a law of nature. It could be otherwise. It will be otherwise when people wake up to the reality of what is being done to them.

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