The traffic lights have been green for some time, yet we are not moving anywhere. It’s rush hour in Auckland and it’s just about to rain. Ahead of me in the queue of cars is a late-model BMW with a driver who appears to be getting agitated. Like most of the cars around me, the BMW contains only one occupant. Through the rear window, I can see hand gestures and head shaking all going on in the silent vacuum of the leather-upholstered interior.
For a minute, I figure the driver is talking on her hands-free phone – until she opens the car door. Out of the silence of the leather upholstered interior pours a ranting torrent of abuse. There is no phone; it is a conversation with herself.
The abuse does not appear to be focused at anyone in particular. Her ranting seems to be at the world, until it takes an unexpected turn as she focuses her attack on the nearby traffic lights. Only the odd word of this rant is reaching my ears. The occupants of the idling cars around her try to avoid eye contact by focusing on their phones. The driver of the late-model BMW takes no heed of the colour change. Her beat is the same whether the lights are red, orange or green. The traffic lights take this with an unblinking stoicism, rolling through their cycle as if she is not there. While no one enjoys rush hour, these occasional public displays of urban neurosis in the midst of it make everyone downright uncomfortable.
Nowhere in all the utopian visions of the perfect city is there any consideration of the automobile. A perfect city is supposed to have an immaculate public transport system, which renders car ownership unnecessary.
Auckland and utopia usually don’t appear in the same sentence. The harsher critics of the place refer to it as a shambolic association of suburbs with no significant public rapid-transit system, which is slowly strangling itself in cars. The shame of it all is that Auckland is a beautiful place surrounded by water, and with an ounce of forethought could have been one of the world’s great cities.
Three great ills
The idea of cities was around well before the invention of the automobile, yet the sheer number of cars now determine their form throughout the world. The proliferation of cars brings three great ills to any urban area: malls, suburbs and traffic lights. While the mall is a tacky facsimile of a city street and the suburb such an ingrained way of living that we barely notice it, the traffic light is a much more powerful shaper of these car-centric landscapes than most would give it credit for.
Even before the advent of the mass-produced automobile, traffic management became an issue for large cities. It was a railway manager and engineer, John Peake Knight, who, in 1865, suggested the use of a system similar to the-then British Railways colour convention to curb the number of horse-drawn carriages congesting the streets of London.
Under Knight’s method, a manual railway semaphore system was used during the day, and at night, gaslights gave red and green signals to the carriages. It was perhaps ahead of its time. The notion of automatic traffic control stagnated and the control of the handful of busy intersections remained the domain of a police officer with only a whistle, a pair of white gloves and a repertoire of eccentric hand signals.
In 1920, Detroit policeman William L Potts invented the four-way, three-colour traffic signal that was installed at the intersection of Woodward and Michigan avenues. Since the introduction of the Model T Ford in 1908, the growth of the automobile in American cities had been exponential. The traffic control technology of the time consisted of a rudimentary two-colour signal light system and was used only at large city intersections.
The red and green two-colour system had issues with not allowing enough time for the traffic to stop at high speed. Some municipalities experimented with leaving the green on for a few seconds after the red was illuminated, to caution the driver that the right of way was soon to change. This idea was greeted with the expected confusion and chaos so it was quickly dropped.
The three-light system that Potts came up with included an amber middle light to warn of the transition from green to red. It was lubricating oil for a squeaky door; suddenly traffic had a flow that was predictable. Other inventors followed suit with different variations on the traffic light system, which caused more confusion until 1935, when the US Federal Highway Administration stepped in and created The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. This dour-sounding document set uniform standards for all traffic signals and road signs. It favoured the three-light system invented by Potts and it was the beginning of traffic lights and traffic control as we know them. It was to change the face of the city forever.
Heartbeat of a city
It is perhaps the traffic light that is the heartbeat of the modern car-centric city. The pulse of traffic it lets through the system of streets, footpaths and motorways is designed to even things out. On Auckland’s Queen St, the lights pulse the pedestrians down the busy footpaths in waves. Despite the abstract nature of the system, most take the colour of the lights to be an unbreakable cosmic law, and the anger that sweeps the crowd when an errant motorist runs a red light is palpable.
The traffic light is at the core of what author Jonathan Raban refers to as the “hard city”, which is the layout, infrastructure and planning of a city. This tends to be an immaculate vision of the mechanics of urban form in the mind of traffic engineers, planners and urban designers and is not to be confused with Raban’s “soft city” – the landscape of the city that is carried in our heads: messy, irreverent and full of unseen boundary markers and the unspoken territory these inhabit.
The most interesting places in any city are where these hard and soft aspects come into contact: the infinite logic and solidity of the traffic light meeting the personal and emotional world of someone in a late-model BMW who is late for some vital appointment and has had enough of the stress and long hours of working to fund it all. If there is a jagged edge to the two kinds of a city it is in situations like this.
I listen on as the driver of the late-model BMW slowly runs out of steam. She has stopped ranting at the traffic lights and has been reduced to tears. The lights keep their perfect beat of red, orange and green. It begins to rain. With the ranting fresh in our minds and the rain softly patting on our windscreens, no one gets out of their car to comfort her. She leans back on the gleaming metallic sides of her vehicle with her head in her hands, and I could have sworn I heard her say in one big shuddering sob, “Bill bloody Potts.”
