My two cars have enough miles between them to circle the earth ten times at the equator. I prefer the older one, a 2000 Honda Civic that used to belong to my mother-in-law. It has racked up most of its miles in New Jersey, where I live, and in New York City. Nothing about it stands out—not its tan color, or its shape, or the small yellow-and-white 2004 parking decal from the College of Staten Island on its left rear window. If you asked people to draw a car, my Honda is probably about what they would come up with. It has been through a lot. Last year, while driving absent-mindedly, I let it get overheated. I had not paid attention to the greenish stain on the pavement where I parked it. All the coolant had leaked out through a hole in the radiator. I started smelling strange smells, steam and smoke came from under the hood, and I pulled over next to a Baptist church on Route 3 whose occupants immediately emerged to ask if they could help. I had “melted” the engine, my mechanic said later; extreme heat had wrecked it beyond repair. He put in a used engine to replace it.
In eighteen years, the car’s exterior has accumulated some dents. I haven’t noticed them, growing accustomed to them over time. The result is that the car looks different to me from the way it does to other people, just the way my face looks different in my bathroom mirror from the way it does in the security photos of me that the staff behind front desks take before I go into office buildings in Manhattan. I mean that I do not think of my car as a junker.
Recently, I was in a seven-car pileup on the Garden State Parkway. No one was badly hurt, though the multiple collisions totalled several cars. I got hit on the left rear bumper, which was smashed in, along with the tail-light. The plastic part of the bumper was hanging down. A state policeman who assessed the various damages came over to my Honda with his clipboard. He walked around the car, taking it all in. Then he stopped at the trashed bumper, pointed to it and the tail-light, and asked, “Was it like this before?”
Some people say that they hate to drive in the city and that driving in New Jersey is even worse. It’s true that New Jersey can be a bit of a puzzle. I think the state has decided that providing the kind of road signs that actually explain where you should go would do more harm than good, slowing traffic flow at crucial junctures. So the policy seems to be that the driver will learn by trial and error. In complicated places, of which there are many, you make the mistake once or twice or three times and then you learn. The misconception people have about driving in New Jersey is that we Jersey drivers think we are driving. In fact, we are swarming. Freeways are nice, but if you have to redirect down a puddled two-lane road between tall reeds that’s fine, too. Anyplace where you can drive is acceptable, basically. And you have to be able to switch quickly from driving-swarming to merely sitting, when you find yourself in a traffic jam. Then it’s best just to chill out, count how many hot, idling trucks within your field of vision have “Logistics” in their company names, and enjoy the temporarily reduced risk of major accident.
My mother-in-law mainly drove the Honda in Staten Island, where she was a professor of economics at C.S.I. She gave it to my wife and me when she went into an assisted-living place. When we lived in SoHo, and then in Park Slope, owning a car seemed to be more trouble than it was worth, and I travelled mostly on foot and by subway. We did have a car—another handed-down Honda—but I always got into it with fear. Now something about the Staten Island origins of my current vehicle, and my status as a longtime resident of New Jersey, lets me relax and become a part of the traffic flow. I’m a local person in an indigenous car and need apologize to nobody.
When that moment of acceptance first happened, I crossed through the mental boundary that separates pedestrian from driver. This is a huge transition. It cleaves the human personality, because driver and pedestrian are not friends. Objects in motion have disdain for objects that move more slowly or not at all, and your surroundings appear different depending on which side of the divide you’re on. Most descriptions of New York City are from the point of view of someone who is not driving. You hear less about how the city looks to drivers for a simple reason: almost nobody wants more drivers. And, once you make the crossover, New York turns out to be a good city to drive in. Starting with what Robert Moses did to New York in the middle of the last century, the city has remade itself to favor drivers. Those past changes cannot be easily reversed, and today the driver still enjoys the substantial advantages they created. In terms of public weal, the fewer people who know this the better.
Four years ago, a young bond trader named Adam Tang, trying for a personal record, drove the almost-circumference of Manhattan, a distance of 26.5 miles, in twenty-four minutes. His route included the F.D.R. Drive and the West Side Highway. Even stopping for red lights, he averaged sixty-six miles per hour. Had he been content to keep the feat to himself, he might have escaped any consequences, but he posted his dashboard-camera video online. When it came to the attention of the authorities, Tang was arrested for reckless driving and reckless endangerment. He hadn’t hit anybody, though the video showed a number of near-misses that could have been fatalities. After a jury found him guilty, the judge sentenced him to the maximum jail time, plus a big fine. Tang, a Canadian citizen, fled to Canada. In 2014, one year A.T. (After Tang), Mayor Bill de Blasio lowered the speed limit on New York City streets to a wishful twenty-five miles per hour.
The fact that somebody drove that fast for twenty-four minutes in one of the most densely populated places on Earth demonstrates what’s possible with New York driving. I eschew this kind of craziness, and I hope Tang never comes back. I drive mainly when I have to, for work or to do errands. Most of the time, I still use public transportation.
For me, the dreamy part of metro-area driving happens when the traffic is light and every highway on my phone’s congestion map glows green. This occurrence is rare. Say that sunrise on a Saturday in June is 5:24 A.M., and it’s light by five. For something I’m writing, I want to make a quick tour of city infrastructure. I am out of the house and driving by five-fifteen. The sun comes up a notch or two north of the Empire State Building and shoots rays split by the city’s canyons across the New Jersey Meadowlands. On the roads are almost no cars at all. I reach the George Washington Bridge in twenty minutes.
I listen to songs on the radio—it’s not important which ones. In my mind, I have just rescued a number of people from a foreign catastrophe (probably somewhere in Russia) and am somehow driving them back to New York while being pursued. This type of scenario seems to be a popular fantasy worldwide. For example, the “Fast and Furious” movies are about driving daringly and skillfully in order to save individual people and also the world. The most recent in the series, “The Fate of the Furious,” has a scene in which good guys driving fast and a bad guy driving fast on New York City streets vie for a briefcase of nuclear codes that is being transported in a limo that also carries the Russian Minister of Defense. The movie has grossed $1.2 billion, in dozens of countries, since its release, in April. A lot more happens in it. Thanks to that movie, tens of millions of people around the world have imagined themselves as beautiful, grease-streaked male and female driver-daredevils trying to out-race an improbably speedy nuclear submarine that is also attacking them by occasionally smashing up though the ice they’re driving on.
In a few minutes, I’m over the bridge and weaving among the pillars that hold up the elevated tracks of the 4 train in the Bronx. The slanted early-morning sun amid the pillars colors the sides of bread trucks moving slowly on their deliveries. At five-fifty on a Saturday morning, the bread trucks, and not much else, are what’s out there. I cross the Harlem River on the Madison Avenue Bridge, one of the city’s lesser known crossings, and then I’m in Manhattan, on the F.D.R. Drive heading south, cruising by the high-rises and the hospitals of the Upper East Side and under the tower of the United Nations. On my left, the East River opens out, pleated by tugboats. The Fifty-ninth Street Bridge (now the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge) and the Roosevelt Island aerial tramway pass above.
An automotive mnemonic for the downtown bridges is “BMW”—Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg, reading from south to north. I choose the B, maybe the most glorious bridge in the world, its cables radiating from their junction points at the top of its towers like beams of light. Continuing to Atlantic Avenue, in Brooklyn, I pass the Barclays Center’s immense rust-colored bicycle helmet; then I bear right at Grand Army Plaza so I can go by 152 Prospect Park West, where my wife and I lived when our children were little. Another right, and six blocks downhill to Third Avenue; left on Third, and up the ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, an elevated road. Again, there are few cars and the road is open.
Before the end of Sunset Park, the B.Q.E. divides from the Belt Parkway. I curl around the far end of Brooklyn on the Belt, with the lower bay on my right, past the joggers on the pathway through Owl’s Head Park and the fishermen leaning on the metal railing. My goal this morning isn’t Coney Island or any parks or beaches. Instead, I drive through the abundant construction up ahead, cross a small drawbridge, keep going, and eventually take the exit for J.F.K. Airport. In normal daytime traffic, J.F.K. lies far from my house, a two-hundred-dollar-plus and two-hour-plus cab ride away; it’s satisfying to be among its terminals and huge jets just ninety minutes after leaving my door.
I cruise J.F.K., then return to the Belt Parkway and go back toward Brooklyn. After eighteen miles, I exit onto the ramp for the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, whose towers are in a haze of mist at this hour. Underneath, a piled-high container ship is departing the harbor. To her starboard are two man-made islands, Hoffman and Swinburne, with a few small sport-fishing boats near them. I wonder if my friend Frank is fishing there this morning. At the far side of the bridge, I join the Staten Island Expressway; in twelve minutes, I’m across the island and on the brand-new Goethals Bridge, leading to New Jersey. Once over the Goethals, I exit left, take the New Jersey Turnpike, and merge onto its northbound lanes.
Here is the best part of the route, because when the landing patterns at Newark Airport are configured in a certain way the planes coming in fly parallel to the turnpike and directly above it. If everything is in synch, I can be motoring up the highway among lanes of cars and trucks (the turnpike is busy at any hour) with the freight-train tracks on the right and all the earthbound vectors lining up as an incoming jet roars overhead, outdistances everybody, diverges to the left, and sets down on a shimmery runway. The music on the radio can be helpful here; I’ve found that a big, anthemic prog-rock song makes a good accompaniment. Every tristate-area driver should experience this cool convergence once in a while.
From the turnpike, it’s I-78 west, Garden State Parkway north to Exit 151, then west on Watchung Avenue, south on Grove Street, and I’m home—five boroughs, four major bridges, two airports, two states, and back in time for breakfast.
A lot of the driving in and around New York takes you under things, through various limbos where dimness surrounds you amid artificial illumination and red tail-lights reflected off shiny surfaces. When you’re enclosed like that, the sounds of other engines get louder, the bass notes of the music in the cars next to you beat like hearts, and your own car’s untreated brake problems echo nerve-rackingly off the nearest wall. The highway subterrains have a Stygian quality—as in the so-called (by me) Forest of Columns that brings traffic onto and off the G.W.B. on the Manhattan side. It’s always twilight in the Forest of Columns. I have been in backups there at all hours as traffic sorts itself out with reverberant, souls-of-the-damned honking. You get to know these inhuman places inch by inch if you drive them a lot. In a tube of the Lincoln Tunnel, as I crawl along, I always keep my eye out for the road sign, stored in a gloomy niche, that says “Police Training in Progress.” It’s been there for years but I’ve never seen it used. And once in a great while there’s the fun-house thrill of seeing a Port Authority person go whizzing by in a “catwalk car”—the vehicle slightly bigger than a skateboard that runs on a track along the tunnel’s wall.
Passing through the tunnels I think of the fish and the keels of ships just a few dozen feet above. While workmen were blasting out the Holland Tunnel, in 1924, the protective layer of clay deposited over the blast area to keep the explosions from blowing a hole in the river bottom and causing disaster to the tunnel-diggers rose high enough that it impeded ships. A glass-topped tunnel would be a great idea, with lights aimed so that you could look upward, as in one of those aquariums where you walk under the tanks. But that would probably only heighten my fear that I’m going to be in a tunnel someday when a wall of water comes screaming down it. During Hurricane Sandy, both tubes of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (now the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel) did take on water, but no vehicles were in them. Five years later, neither tube is fully repaired.
The longest trip I’ve ever made returning to New Jersey from my sister Maggie’s apartment in Brooklyn—almost three hours to cover the twenty-three miles—included about an hour stopped in the middle tube of the Lincoln Tunnel. My wife and I were sitting there listening to the 1010 WINS traffic reports every ten minutes. After forty minutes or so, the traffic guy said that because of construction the middle tube of the Lincoln Tunnel had been closed for the night. Immediately, as one, all the drivers in the tunnel leaned on their horns. Then as far as we could see in either direction people jumped out of their cars and began shouting and waving their arms and hollering into their cell phones. They wandered up and down talking to one another, opened their car doors, yelled some more, re-honked their horns. The next WINS report made a correction: the middle tube had not been closed for the night, merely blocked by an accident in Jersey. We got back in our vehicles, still fuming but mollified.
In New Jersey, we need more tunnels; more bridges, too, though I don’t know where we’d put the bridges, with the ones we have already occupying the best spots for overwater crossings. The whole region needs new infrastructure, with the Long Island Railroad having more problems and delays each year, and the L train scheduled to be out of commission for fifteen months, and the subways in general no longer keeping up at rush hour.
Today’s mess has a particular history in our state. All political buffs should make a point of checking out the toll-booth entry lanes to the G.W.B. in Fort Lee—the lanes that two of Governor Chris Christie’s allies recently received jail terms for closing, back in 2015. These are the most consequential toll-booth lanes in the world. I am always looking for new places in need of historic markers, and the Fort Lee lanes take the top spots in that category. When the Christie allies shut down the lanes in order to create misery among drivers—misery that, they hoped, would be turned to anger at the mayor of Fort Lee, a Christie non-supporter—the deed injected deliberate malice into the everyday headaches of getting back and forth.
And, once the idea that the traffic jams might be trying to drive us crazy on purpose entered the public consciousness, the system was in trouble. A free-for-all mentality took over and any sense of common interest vanished. Billboards that advertise huge S.U.V.s motoring like tanks over potholed roads implied that each of us should be fighting the transit demon individually—Hey, get your own S.U.V.! Get your own highway! It didn’t help that Christie had vetoed the building of a new railroad tunnel under the Hudson leading to Manhattan. Today, if you are quiet on a delayed New Jersey Transit train waiting to get into the existing tunnel, and you listen to the ambient conversation noise among the passengers, you will hear “Christie!” muttered over and over.
We have become a frantic country. On the day I got into the pileup, I could feel a static of rage and desperation in the air. As I stopped for gas that morning, I thought that the last thing I needed was to get into an accident. My wife had been sick for five months and was slowly recovering. Conservatively, almost wincingly, I pulled onto the Garden State Parkway, on my way to see how construction was progressing on the Bayonne Bridge, a project I’d been keeping track of. Traffic was bumper to bumper and moving at sixty-five or seventy. Drivers tailgated one another and changed lanes like mad. I maintained the usual three car lengths between my front bumper and the car ahead, but that space kept filling up with lane-changers. At top speed, traffic approached the interchange where I-78 goes off to the east and to the west. I-78 east leads to Bayonne.
The exit lanes are narrow here, with a concrete retaining wall and a steep slope close on the right, and no room to change your mind if you get in the westbound exit by mistake. A driver perhaps four cars ahead of me suddenly decided to stop. I hit the brakes. A low-slung red car a few feet off my rear bumper swerved to the right and somehow made it through the narrow space between the right lane and the wall, and sped away. A car behind the red car hit me and spun across the three lanes. Several cars hit that car, on both sides, while other cars were colliding farther back, the instantaneous concussive noises made both softer and harder by the popping of the air bags and the shattering of the windows. Broken glass flew by me as if shot from a fire hose. Standing on the brakes, I skidded to a stop without hitting the car in front of me, which caused it not to hit the car in front of it. In a half second, smashed cars came to rest all over the highway like rolled dice.
After that, I went Elsewhere for a while. I guess I just sat there. Looking around inside, I found nothing broken, on me or in the car’s interior. Even the windows had remained intact, though glass from someone else’s windows strewed my hood and trunk. The car in front of me had no mark on it. The driver, a woman, got out and lit a cigarette. I could not see people in the smashed-up cars, because the popped air bags blocked where the windows used to be.
My car, still running, had been knocked into neutral. I turned it off. In the vicinity, I heard no sirens or honking, just a strange quiet. A few cars up ahead, a woman had got out and lain down on the shoulder, and someone was leaning over her. I took out my phone and almost called my wife, then decided not to. A couple of months before, thieves had boosted my wallet on a trolleybus in Russia and I had called her right afterward to tell her, even though it was four-thirty in the morning in New Jersey. With a little restraint, the shock of that call could have been avoided. As I was thinking about this, I noticed that the highway had filled with police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks. I got out and saw that aside from the smashed bumper my car was basically O.K., with no leaking fluids or compromised tires. When I turned the key, it started. A helicopter hovered overhead. First responders kept coming up and asking if I was hurt. Thankfully, I wasn’t.
Neither was the woman in the car in front of me. She stood there kind of hugging herself and shaking. “I’m on my third cigarette already,” she said. She worked as a car-service dispatcher at Newark Airport and was on her way to that job. She had very long fingernails and wore a low-cut top. She told me she was glad I was all right and I told her I was glad she was all right. The driver of the car behind me, a grandmother with several grandchildren headed to the Jersey Shore for the weekend, had applied her brakes so hard that they locked, and now they wouldn’t unlock. Nobody had hit her and she hadn’t hit anybody. She put her grandchildren up on the concrete wall, where they sat and watched. Figuring out who had hit whom gave the police a challenge. They walked all over the fifty-yard-long crash site trying to make sense of it, holding their clipboards horizontally and sketching on them. Meanwhile, E.M.S. workers put injured people in neck and back braces and transferred them from the wrecks onto gurneys and into ambulances. Several of the injured were young women who seemed stunned and in pain as they were wheeled by.
A man with a long beard was walking the crash site and sweeping up the glass and plastic and metal fragments with a push broom and then consolidating the smaller piles into bigger piles. A state policeman took my driver’s license and registration. People were photographing the damage with their phones. On the other side of the chain-link fence that separated the highway from a neighborhood street, a crowd of people gathered. A woman there offered a very detailed description of what had happened that didn’t coincide with what I’d seen, but I wasn’t sure what I’d seen. A man in a white T-shirt asked me, through the chain links, “Are you all right?” I said I was. He said, “Man, I’m glad you’re all right.”
The ambulances took five or six people in all. Some had to wait until the Irvington Fire Department pried the doors of their cars open. Then the rest of us stood around and waited. As the stunned feeling wore off, we were talking to one another and to the cops and the firemen. It was unusual to have the width of the Garden State’s three lanes to stroll around in. At the edge of our clearing, beyond the flashing police lights, the immense traffic jam we’d caused stretched who knew how far. The frantic feeling had subsided and we were just neighbors commiserating and passing the time. I stood with a few other people listening to a fireman who was retiring in one week; he said that he hoped this would be his last accident. Continuing not to call my wife increased my private sense of rightness, and not being injured felt wonderful.
The police told us that we had to stay until the hospital called with information about the people the ambulances had taken. If any of them died or had suffered major injury, the accident became a possible crime scene, and a more detailed investigation would be required. The state cop brought back my driver’s license and registration and looked again at my car’s front. After about an hour, I saw a cop talk on his cell phone and then walk over to the head fireman, and the fireman nodded and smiled. Then the cop walked among the waiting drivers saying that the hospital had reported nobody seriously hurt. We all cheered the news, giving one another the thumbs-up. Those of us who didn’t need tow trucks made ready to leave.
The cop I’d talked to earlier checked out my car a last time and said, “Looks O.K. to me. You can go.” Evidently, the collision had loosened the muffler because the car made a racket as I drove off. It was great to be moving again.
Fifty years ago, when I was in high school in Ohio, I ran sprints on the track team. Back then, construction crews were still putting in the interstate highways and had just completed a section of I-480 near my house. The smooth white pavement stretched through a bulldozed mud corridor with earthmoving equipment parked alongside—empty new road all the way to the horizon. I thought that would be a good place to train. I stepped onto pavement so fresh it still didn’t have lines painted on it and began to run sprints of fifty and a hundred yards. My soul collapsed at my feet. The massiveness of the road and the puniness of my efforts almost made me give up running permanently. The Olympic hundred-metre champion Bob Hayes himself would have thought he was nothing if he ran on that highway.
Speed affects you only if you have something to compare it to. The whole planet is moving around the sun at seventy thousand miles an hour, but, with our lack of perspective, the thrill is wasted on us. Some time after the downer of running on the new highway, I had the experience of doing sprints in one of the halls of the school athletic building on a day that was too rainy for us to practice outside. The walls, just inches away on either side, gave the illusion that we were going blazingly fast. The office of the athletic director, Mr. Helwig, observed the hall through a large interior window, and we thundered by the window in a blink while Mr. Helwig sat at his desk and didn’t look up. I never felt so fast or so strong in my life.
The truest basis of comparison, of course, is with other runners. It’s the purest exhilaration to be running fast with fast people. Once, in a big meet, I did the hundred-yard dash in ten and two-tenths seconds, finishing second to Gene Thomas, who did a ten-flat. Nowadays, I look at the numbers on the “Walk” sign blinking down as I approach a New York City crosswalk and wonder if ten seconds will be enough. That is how life goes. I still remember running in a pack with Gene and a bunch of other guys. We won our prep-league interstate championship in 1968. Our shoes’ long, narrow, sharp spikes went into the track crisply, cinders flew out with each step; and once, during a quarter-mile race, a little boy playing in the pole-vault pit rolled into the first lane right in front of us. Gene jumped over the boy effortlessly, and the rest of us avoided him somehow. The boy got up untouched as we sped on. His name was Fred Harris. He must be about sixty years old now.
Sometimes when I’m out on a walk in my neighborhood in the early morning, I go to a nearby bridge over the Garden State Parkway and I look at the cars that fill it bank to bank. Most are probably headed for the bridges and tunnels; since the New Jersey Transit train service has deteriorated (“Christie!”), I could swear that the number of vehicles has doubled. Six-fifteen on a Monday morning and the traffic is roaring. We may be a divided country, but we’re all out there on the same road. ♦
