The Traffic Dialectic

Sean Dockray, Steve Rowell and Fiona Whitton dissect our ambivalence toward – and the taxonomic evolution of – traffic in issue 17 of Cabinet magazine.

The word traffic is always a little slippery, one of those words that escapes us when we try to pin it down. When engineers say traffic, they mean the movement of vehicles along a roadway, or what you'd find if you asked a dictionary. For the rest of us civilians, however, traffic has come to mean the exact opposite: that phenomenon of vehicles crowding a roadway until everything slows down to a frustrating crawl.

Roughly ten years and 400,000 automobiles into the twentieth century, the phenomenon was given its own name by the Saturday Evening Post: the traffic jam. While this seems quaint to a driver accustomed to four-hour-long rush hours, engineers continue to categorize it as "traffic congestion" even if there's no consensus on what that means. Is it slowness at a point over time—or over an area at a point in time? If so, how slow? Or maybe it's just a feeling? In cities all over the world, congestion is becoming the rule, which is to say that it is simply becoming "traffic."