Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac? – George Carlin
I love playing chess. Specifically, I love playing blitz chess, where each player gets five to ten minutes on their clock. The game is under the gun. It’s an intense, rapid competition and can hinge on a single move, a single catastrophic blunder, or simply an aggressive time management strategy where one player dies by the clock. A poor position can feel suffocating with time ticking away, and even being in control of the game can be just as stressful when you have a stubborn opponent who won’t resign.
Importantly, every move involves the evaluation of the position. You have to calculate as many possibilities as you can, think about all the directions that the game can take on. Does your attack leave important pieces vulnerable? Does castling improve your defense or compromise it, entombing your king in a coffin? Is it a dangerous trap to take the undefended pawn? These are questions that must be considered in rapid fire. And any single miscalculation can be fatal.
I love playing chess, but I also hate playing chess – it’s very much a love/hate relationship. It can be frustrating, and it is mentally exhausting. As Garry Kasparov put it, “chess is mental torture”, and calculation can be grueling, even for an amateur like myself.
But this article is not about chess – it’s about driving my stupid car from point A to point B. As a convert to the gospel of urbanism, I have plenty of gripes with cars, be it their deadliness, environmental impact, financial cost, or just how goddamn loud they are. Here, though, the subject is more about the unexamined, ordinary responsibilities of driving a car.
So why start with my ode to chess?
Simply put, we are all playing chess in our private vehicles. We’re forced to choose when to run the yellow light, forced to choose which route is best, when to change lanes, when to turn, whether it’s safe to look away from the road, whether or not to speed, how close to follow the car ahead of you, forced to check for pedestrians, bicyclists, turning cars, cops, deer, fire hydrants, forced to find a parking spot, forced to do the stupid parallel parking challenge (judged as an idiot if you can’t parallel park on your first try), must evaluate road signs, must remain attentive in stop-and-go traffic, forced to avoid reckless drivers, forced to pass timid drivers. And that’s only while you’re actually driving! Even if magical “self driving cars” come along and somehow address those concerns to a sufficient degree, you’re still forced to choose what car to get, what color to have, what price range you’re comfortable with, whether it’s new or used, what features to get, whether it’s cool and sexy, forced to manage the insurance, fuel, repairs, maintenance, financing, registration, license, must pass a driving test, must store it (tho the state will probably provide that for free at the expense of people who don’t drive cars).
When you step on the brakes, your life is in your foot’s hands – George Carlin
Conservatives will sometimes argue that cars are great for Americans because it is the ultimate “freedom” vehicle, but for my entire life these decisions have struck me as a burden. I hate having to figure out my route while flying down the highway at 60 miles an hour. Missed your exit? Tough luck, sorry you don’t love freedom. Forgot to renew your tabs? Surprise! That will be fifty bucks. All these decisions are the responsibility of you, the individual, rather than someone who is paid to do this weirdly technical exercise correctly.
And so, the way I see it, it’s comparable to having a legion of chess players out on the road, playing blitz as their mental toll payment to get where they are going. And a lot of people suck at chess! This is simply not the case with walking, bicycling, or riding the bus. The decisions, where they exist, are much lower stakes (nobody is going to die walking wrong), and in the case of transit are entrusted to a professional. Keeping with the chess analogy, on a bus or train we basically let grandmasters do the chess playing for us – and, as a result, all those decisions I listed evaporate; instead, you can read a book.
This dynamic of “individual responsibility” is a much, much broader concept than this specific issue of transportation. It appears in practically every aspect of American culture – from work life to private life. For example, rather than holding corporations responsible for recycling glass bottles, responsibility is outsourced to the consumer to maximize profits. But driving is such a day-to-day activity that it particularly grinds my gears. It’s all just to get from point A to point B.
I just looked up from my laptop and saw congestion at the intersection outside the window of this coffee shop; a woman gave double middle fingers to another driver because she couldn’t safely turn. And that’s a totally normal thing when it comes to driving a car, I myself have given the finger to a few maniac drivers in the past.
Road rage itself feels an awful lot like a common frustration in blitz chess – tilt. It’s a concept from poker, and even earlier from pinball. Tilt is the absolute fury that occurs when you go on a losing streak. You lose your cool, get angry, and make bad decisions. It’s a common phenomenon in competitive activities, i.e. tennis, poker, chess, boxing, etc.
Whether or not road rage actually is related to tilt, I don’t get why we’ve built our transportation system in a way that it frequently feels like a competition – specifically, a competition stemming from rapid fire decision making. It’s bad enough that in the time I’ve written this article, I’ve personally witnessed this rage, a middle finger that would essentially never occur in any other context.
We need to get away from this system. It’s unhealthy, literally, and I don’t like having to think about where my exit is. It’s not out of some bizarre, pro-bus fetish, I don’t “identify” as a transit user. It’s just extremely weird to me that a quite technical exercise is expected of the entire population. Old people shouldn’t drive, children shouldn’t drive, bad drivers shouldn’t drive – it’s too dangerous and technical. And self driving won’t rescue us, it’s too expensive; Tesla will bill you $12K for experimental self driving – for that price you could simply hire a part time professional driver.
Solutions exist now. These are what are needed: bike lanes, investment in transit, safety on transit, and community buy-in to a new culture of getting around, where it shouldn’t feel like a frustrating game of chess. I’ll end with a tweet from the forward-thinking mayor of Bothell, someone who certainly has the right idea when it comes to these issues.
