In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson offers some wonderfully ill-advised advice for dealing with cops:
About five miles back I had a brush with the CHP. Not stopped or pulled over: nothing routine. I always drive properly. A bit fast, perhaps, but always with consummate skill and a natural feel for the road that even cops recognize. No cop was ever born who isn’t a sucker for a finely-executed hi-speed Controlled Drift all the way around one of those clover-leaf freeway interchanges.
Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop. Your normal speeder will panic and immediately pull over to the side when he sees the big red light behind him . . . and then he will start apologizing, begging for mercy.
This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the cop-heart. The thing to do—when you’re running along about a hundred or so and you suddenly find a CHP-tracker on your trail—what you want to do then is accelerate. Never pull over with the first siren-howl. Mash it down and make the bastard chase you at speeds up to 120 all the way to the next exit. He will follow. But he won’t know what to make of your blinker-signal that says you’re about to turn right.
This is to let him know you’re looking for a proper place to pull off and talk . . . keep signaling and hope for an off-ramp, one of those uphill side-loops with a sign saying “Max Speed 25” . . . and the trick, at this point, is to suddenly leave the freeway and take him into the chute at no less than a hundred miles an hour.
He will lock his brakes about the same time you lock yours, but it will take him a moment to realize that he’s about to make a 180-degree turn at this speed . . . but you will be ready for it, braced for the Gs and the fast heel-toe work, and with any luck at all you will have come to a complete stop off the road at the top of the turn and be standing beside your automobile by the time he catches up.
He will not be reasonable at first . . . but no matter. Let him calm down. He will want the first word. Let him have it. His brain will be in a turmoil: he may begin jabbering, or even pull his gun. Let him unwind; keep smiling. The idea is to show him that you were always in total control of yourself and your vehicle—while he lost control of everything.
How often do our confrontations with the law have this concrete quality, where the Man is actually a man, and may be presumed to harbor human qualities behind the mirrored sunglasses? Including, quite possibly, the quality of being a bastard. It’s the mustache that gives him away: here is someone who understands a good old-fashioned pissing contest, and though I will certainly lose the legal fight, the human fight isn’t entirely effaced behind impersonal mechanisms, whether bureaucratic or technological. It’s one thing to lose a fight, another to be imperceptibly suffocated under the insistence that there is no fight, only the operation of disinterested reason. Hannah Arendt called this “the rule of Nobody.”
THE SAFETY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: BEHIND THE CURTAIN OF PUBLIC AUTHORITY
Speed cameras are getting destroyed around the Western world, not in haphazard acts of vandalism, but in something that more closely resembles a political insurgency. Can this safely be written off as mere libertarian peevishness of the sort that comes naturally to adolescents and other malcontents? In some settings, it presents rather differently: as an especially concrete manifestation of a wider crisis of political legitimacy that has been brewing for some time in the Western democracies. The hunch I want to explore in this chapter is that the anger provoked by automated traffic enforcement, in particular, can shed light on our political moment.
In ever more areas of life, algorithms are coming to substitute for judgment exercised by identifiable human beings who can be held to account. The rationale offered is that automated decision-making will be more reliable. But a further attraction is that it serves to insulate various forms of power from popular anger.
Our readiness to acquiesce in this is surely due in part to our ideal of procedural fairness, which requires that individual discretion exercised by those in power should be replaced with rules whenever possible, because authority will inevitably be abused. This is the original core of liberalism, dating from the English Revolution.
Mechanized judgment resembles liberal proceduralism. It relies on our habit of deference to rules, and our suspicion of visible, personified authority. But its effect is to erode precisely those procedural liberties that are the great accomplishment of the liberal tradition, and to place authority beyond scrutiny.
Our larger purpose here is to understand why so many people feel angry, put-upon, and powerless. And why so many, in expressing their anger, refer to something called “the establishment,” that shadowy and pervasive entity. What is at stake is the qualitative character of institutional authority—how we experience it.
IN FISCAL YEAR 2016, the District of Columbia took in $107.2 million from its photo radar traffic enforcement cameras. Throw in red light cameras and parking tickets, and the figure comes to $193 million, accounting for 97 percent of all fines and fees collected by the city.1 The rationale offered by the police is, of course, safety. Shortly after the program of automated traffic enforcement was launched, the chief of police took great offense at the suggestion that money might be driving it. Yet it seems the intersections where the cameras were installed were selected not because they were particularly prone to accidents, but rather because they had the greatest volume of flow and the shortest yellow lights. In their pitch to the city, the company that installed the cameras (a subdivision of the defense contractor Lockheed Martin) is reported to have emphasized that the vast majority of motorists cited would be commuters who live in Virginia and Maryland, hence not DC voters. Essentially it was free money being offered, a revenue stream completely insulated from political blowback. We cannot refrain from noting that the motto on DC license plates is “No Taxation Without Representation.”
The growing automated traffic enforcement regime in the Unites States has been documented in some outstanding investigative journalism. The case of Washington, DC, was reported by Matt Labash in a five-part series published in the Weekly Standard. The case of Chicago has been presented in an ongoing series of deeply reported pieces by David Kidwell in the Chicago Tribune. Together with the scientific studies and government findings they cite, these provide a clear picture.
The duration of a yellow light, or “amber time,” is one of the most reliable safety tools in the traffic engineer’s bag of tricks. One might naïvely suppose that as long as the duration is consistent, drivers will adjust their behavior to match. But it is a fairly complex set of events that occur in the mind and body of a driver when the light turns yellow. Perception-reaction time is largely invariant for any given individual, a function of his or her neural wiring at a fairly “low level” (as the neurophysiologists say): how long does it take for the yellow light to get processed into an “action plan” and sent down the pipeline to generate the appropriate muscle responses? Individuals vary in this, and it is prudent to set amber times to accommodate the least catlike among us (the assumption in the formula used by the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ Traffic Engineering Handbook to calculate amber time is a reaction time of one second). But there is another layer to our response that takes place at a higher, properly “cognitive” level and goes more slowly: you have to decide whether you are going to stop or continue through the intersection. Traffic engineers call this the dilemma zone. “Drivers have to make an instantaneous decision when the yellow light comes on,” said one traffic expert quoted in the Chicago Tribune. “‘How far am I from the intersection? How fast am I going? How much time do I think I have? How long is the yellow light going to be?’ And some drivers are going to make the wrong calculation, and maybe enter the intersection a fraction of a second after the light has turned red. It’s not because they are doing it intentionally or aggressively,” he said. “They just made a wrong calculation.” Another expert quoted in the same story said that the problem with a yellow light that is too short is that “you are forcing the motorist to make a decision to either decelerate too quickly or to speed up to get through the intersection. And that should not happen. If you are going to err, you don’t want to set it too short.”
The shorter the yellow light, the more compressed the dilemma zone is and the more variability there will be in how the driver in front of you responds to the appearance of the yellow. His behavior becomes less predictable. Increasing the duration of a yellow light even by a small amount, say from three seconds to three and a half, has a big effect in reducing collisions at an intersection, and it is free.2
But evidently free safety isn’t nearly as appealing to the authorities as free money. As of 2016, Chicago’s red-light camera system had brought in about $600 million. The city’s transportation website claims to follow the standard ITE formula, but investigative journalists from the Chicago Tribune discovered that the city tinkers with the equation’s assumptions to generate shorter yellows, using a deceleration rate of 11.2 ft/second/second rather than the ITE’s recommended 10 ft/sec/sec. They also assume cars are traveling at the posted speed limit, rather than surveying the actual speeds at an intersection or making more realistic assumptions, as traffic engineers urge municipalities to do. In 2014 the Tribune hired traffic researchers at Texas A&M University’s Transportation Institute to conduct a study of Chicago’s red-light camera system. They found that “the city routinely placed cameras at intersections that had few if any injury-related crash problems, leaving the cameras little room to improve safety. At the same time, experts found, the unnecessary cameras at more than 70 intersections prompted many drivers to slam on the brakes in efforts to avoid an automated ticket, causing a significant increase in injury-related rear-end crashes near cameras throughout the city.” In 2016, the paper reported that “most of those cameras are still snapping photos—and raking in millions of dollars in traffic fines for City Hall—even though Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his transportation chief were given scientific evidence more than a year ago that showed many of the cameras are causing more injuries than they prevent.”3
The firm that installed the cameras, Redflex Traffic Systems, is based in Australia. Now, a company from outside Cook County, to say nothing of another continent, doesn’t just go waltzing into Chicago hoping to make big money without first establishing the right . . . relationships. The firm needed somebody to school them in the Chicago Way, and point out which of the aldermen and other relevant members of the City Hall ecosystem take an interest in the safety of the citizens. Think of the children!
Enter John Bills. He began his career with the city in 1979 as a street light repairman. But his real skills lay elsewhere. The Tribune reports that “for more than two decades, Bills was a top-earning precinct captain for Madigan’s powerful 13th Ward political organization, rising through the patronage army as an early employee at the city’s Bureau of Electricity, known by city workers as ‘Madigan Electric’ because of the number of 13th Ward loyalists employed there.” Bills worked his way up to second in command at the city’s Department of Transportation, where for about a decade he “accepted up to $2,000 in cash bribes for every new camera that he ordered installed throughout the city.”4
When you’ve got that kind of action, you’re going to have challengers. The Tribune reports that “a competing camera company had aligned itself with Ald. [Edward] Burke, 14th, the powerful chairman of the City Council’s Finance Committee.” Burke “was working hard to torpedo the [Redflex] deal so it could go to his favored vendor, Automated Traffic Solutions—a company that had hired a longtime Burke ally as a subcontractor.”
The net haul of Bills, the transportation manager, was about two million dollars before he found himself on that well-worn conveyor that runs from City Hall to the big house in Joliet—thanks, as usual, to the good work of the Tribune. How much of that he got to keep is unclear; his attorney claims he was merely serving as a bagman for his patrons higher up the political food chain. We’ll never know; Bills is the one who is now serving twenty years. The top executives of Redflex were fully informed about the kickback arrangement, as were all of the board members, in an internal memo. They have been accused of similar practices in thirteen U.S. states. It has also been a consistent pattern that when the cameras go in, amber times are reduced.
The case of Chicago, with its cast of colorful characters out of a David Mamet movie, risks diverting us from a more general truth of municipal finance: cities become hooked on any increase in revenue, and have a hard time revising automated traffic enforcement systems, even after their perverse effects have been demonstrated—or even allowing them to be debated in official circles.5 In 2017, the District of Columbia anticipated collecting more than $837 million in traffic fines and fees over the next five years.6
There is a generalization to be drawn from these cases. Sometimes rules are deliberately formulated to be at odds with reasonableness, by parties who have an interest in the conflict this creates.
Manipulating amber times is an especially easy way to do this, but there are other tricks of the trade. The “geometric” elements of a road (lane width, shoulder width, curvature, grade) influence how we drive. Thus, if lane width is reduced from twelve feet to ten feet, the observed “free flow speed” (when traffic is light) of the average motorist on a high-speed roadway is reduced by 6.6 miles per hour.7 We naturally experience the increased challenge of staying close to the center of the lane and do the reasonable thing. Accordingly, there are lane-width standards that correspond to the posted speed limit; they are meant to align the law with our natural reasonableness. But to an enterprising local bureaucrat, these same facts present an opportunity. The George Washington Parkway in Washington, DC, is a notorious speed trap. The lanes are built to the 55 mph standard, but the posted speed limit is 45 mph. The reason this tactic is so effective for generating revenue is that motorists’ speed is actually quite insensitive to the posted speed limit.
The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) conducted an experiment and found that when the speed limit changed by 15 mph, the 85th percentile speed—this is the speed under which 85 percent of drivers travel—changed no more than 1 to 2 mph. In another study, the same team of engineers, headed by Dr. Samuel Tignor, formerly the FHWA’s technical director for safety and research development, found that “current speed limits are set too low to be accepted as reasonable by the vast majority of drivers. Only about 1 in 10 speed zones has better than 50 percent compliance. The posted speeds make technical violators out of motorists driving at reasonable and safe speeds.”8
One can find parallels in other policy areas where a proliferation of rules provides a sheen of rationality, but it is in the gap between the rules and reasonableness that officialdom feeds.9 Rigid sentencing laws and the “war on drugs” were indispensable to the rise of a massive prison industry. The TSA comes up with rules for a stage production of “security theater” that each of us must perform, while knowing full well the absurdity of most of it. Those machines you step into and receive a big dose of microwaves from? And the wipe-down with a towelette that is then inserted into a black box to detect explosive residue? Largely useless. The military refuses to use them; instead they use dogs if they are looking for explosives. But the machines are big business, and dog training is not. Meanwhile, independent audits that have attempted to sneak weapons onto planes have found that about 90 percent of them go undetected.10
When there is high-tech involved, as in automated traffic enforcement, we have a duty to scrutinize with special care the claims made by those who want to extract money from normal behavior, while expressing their solicitude for our well-being. Machines don’t make judgments; they follow the laws of physics. They do, however, offer an image of neutrality and necessity, behind which the operation of human judgment becomes harder to make out, and harder to hold to account. The Tribune had to hire a team of forensic engineers from a different state to figure out what the city was up to with its automated enforcement. The real utility of a black box is that it serves to insulate power from popular anger.
This is highly germane to the way we experience public authority these days: it seems to be exercised by some entity that cannot be addressed, in the way that mustachioed CHP cop could be, and it may as well be located in Australia as at City Hall, for all one can tell. This surely contributes to the crisis of legitimacy that has been spreading through the liberal democracies. The “black box” quality of authority may be due to its being located in inscrutable machine logic, it may arise from the transfer of national sovereignty to opaque supranational bodies such as the European Union, or it may lay in the sociological gap between the majority and a ruling element that seems to have its own internal codes.
Toward the end of 2018, Emmanuel Macron faced mass political unrest on a scale France had not seen in the postwar era.11 The Yellow Vest movement, named for the high-visibility vests all motorists are required to carry in case of emergency, marched through French cities by the hundreds of thousands. The revolt was precipitated by two measures: a fuel tax intended to reduce carbon emissions, and a reduction in speed limits. These disproportionately affected the French equivalent of “flyover country,” or what the French geographer Christophe Guilluy calls “la France périphérique.” Out in the hinterland, one must do a lot of driving, so these proposals touched on concrete interests. The interests of metropolitan professionals in finance, media, and academia—the heart of Macron’s base—tilt differently. They rely on the Metro, and just as important, they inhabit a symbolic moral economy in which environmental virtue is crucial to the self-image of the class, and one of its titles to rule.
The famously well-educated French bureaucracy is drawn from this same milieu, coming up through the Grandes Écoles, and bleeds seamlessly into the international cadre of EU political managers. These are more likely to keep their residence in Paris than in the drab precincts of Brussels from which they issue their enlightened dictats. From the perspective of la France périphérique, evidently all this began to look like one big blob of bicycle moralists, electric scooter gliders-about, and carbon teetotalers.
Some hint of this cultural divide that underlies the noisier economic grievance of the Yellow Vests was evident in a photo that was published in the New York Times but not remarked upon: amidst the mayhem of street battles with police in early January 2019 was a bicycle that had been set on fire. It could be taken as a witty bit of trolling, directed against the self-image of the ruling class.
In his 2018 book The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri diagnoses the eruption of protest movements around the world in 2011—Occupy Wall Street, the indignados in Spain, and the violent street protests in London, to name a few—as a politics of pure negation, driven more by the romance of denunciation than by any positive program. These protests expressed distrust of institutional voices and a notable collapse of social authority. On left and right alike, people feel the system is rigged, to use one of President Trump’s favorite words, and indeed political leaders themselves have stoked this conviction, insisting that elections lost by their side are illegitimate. This is dangerous stuff, a form of political nihilism that Gurri traces to an epistemic crisis brought on by the internet’s destruction of those monopolies of information that once secured institutional authority. The Yellow Vest protesters would seem to fit Gurri’s analysis, or came to do so as the movement was co-opted by semiprofessional agitators moved by the spirit of negation. But in its early phases, the Yellow Vests expressed something more substantive, and important for our purposes in this book.
The really significant material damage done by the protesters has been to France’s vast network of photo radar speed traps. About 60 percent of them had been disabled as of January 2019. For the sheer scale of the vandalism, I can think of no modern parallel. How are we to understand this widespread guerrilla action? First, note that it was triggered by a reduction in the speed limit for many main roads from 90 kilometers per hour (about 55 mph) to 80 kilometers per hour (50 mph), a seemingly trivial adjustment. But also, an adjustment starting from a speed that seems a bit slow to begin with? It is hard to say, without knowing the roads firsthand. Claire Berlinski, writing about the Yellow Vests, said that with the destruction of the photo radar speed system, “The French state will lose tens of millions of euros in revenues from this . . . . In 2017, traffic yielded on average 84 million euros a month. This, of course, is exactly why the Gilets Jaunes smashed them. They believed the state was running a speeding-ticket racket.”
Officialdom reacted as one would expect, but with an extra bit of moral muscle flexing. Christophe Castaner, France’s interior minister, said, “I saw on social networks a few fools who appear next to burnt speed cameras. I do not wish for them to one day face the reality of a death on the road. It’s not about figures, it’s about life.” Emmanuel Barbe, the head of France’s road safety agency, said that lives had been endangered. “This damage to the speed camera network . . . will lead to deaths. And that makes me profoundly sad.”12
The sadness of the functionary is profound. Death is no joking matter, and it goes without saying that speed kills. But let us look into this. It is certainly true that abrupt deceleration can kill. As a simple matter of physics, if two cars collide there is no doubt that the higher the speed, the greater the damage and the likelihood of injury or death—keeping all other variables constant. But it is also true that billiard balls colliding on Newton’s frictionless surface are not the most apt image for capturing the complex mix of road design, traffic, weather conditions, and “human factors” that make up the driving situation. That is why some states have a “Basic Speed Law” that overrides posted speed limits and holds motorists accountable for driving safely under prevailing conditions. The need for human judgment cannot be done away with by simple rules, yet automated speed enforcement is not sensitive to any of this.
As in every debate, statistics are one of the favorite instruments of advocates, but properly interpreting quantitative data is a more nuanced undertaking than most of us are prepared to undertake. Doing so requires access to the raw data, prior to its transformation into talking points through a process of cherry-picking and tendentious contextualization. Short of that, we can at least take note of the interests of those who use the data to persuade us of one thing or another. I can’t speak to the various players in France, but in the United States, the source that gets cited the most by journalists when they write one of their click-bait genre pieces about an “epidemic” of speeding hooligans mowing people down on the roads is the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. This entity is “wholly supported” by the insurance companies who make up its members, according to its own literature. It is not surprising that it favors lower speed limits and has taken a strong stand in favor of automated enforcement. As Labash points out, the industry “has a financial stake in seeing as many photo tickets issued as possible, since speeding and red-light infractions allow insurance companies to bleed their customers with higher premiums for the next three to five years.”13
The U.S. government is presumably a more disinterested source for information about the role of speeding in crashes than the insurance industry, localities that depend on citations for revenue, or ministers in the government of a self-proclaimed “Jupiter” (Macron) with an approval rating in the low 20s trying to put down a drivers’ revolt by invoking images of gratuitous carnage. The picture presented by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on the issue of speeding is mixed. It is complicated by some definitional issues, and the fact that statistics are compiled only for crashes involving fatalities, as it is only in these cases that police are required to gather the pertinent data, which are then entered into the Fatality Analysis Reporting System. With these methodological caveats in mind, here are the numbers for fatal crashes in 2016 (the last year for which data are available as I write) in which speeding was a “relevant factor”: “Eighteen percent of the drivers involved were speeding at the time of the crash, and 27 percent of those killed were in a crash involving at least one speeding driver.”14
According to its website, “NHTSA considers a crash to be speeding-related if any driver in the crash was charged with a speeding-related offense or if a police officer indicated that racing, driving too fast for conditions, or exceeding the posted speed limit was a contributing factor in the crash.” It is largely up to the discretion of the responding police officer, then, to say that speed was a factor in the crash. Driving “too fast for conditions” is a discretionary judgment that I think we can trust state troopers to make appropriately, as they generally have wide experience. But “exceeding the posted speed limit” is a catchall that could, at least, gather in the great majority of drivers, given that only about one in ten speed zones has better than 50 percent compliance. Given the ambiguities of the scene that a responding officer encounters, the paucity of evidence, and conflicting testimonies, and given that he needs to check some box for “contributing factors,” “exceeding the posted speed limit” has the advantage that it can be determined by relatively easy measurement of skid marks and debris fields. It becomes a readily available way of cutting through the miasma, clearing the scene, and getting traffic moving again. The inclusion of the “exceeding the posted speed limit” criterion for specifying which crashes are “speeding-related” surely inflates this category. Even so, speeding has a much smaller role than both alcohol and “failure to keep in proper lane or running off the road” as a “relevant factor” in fatal crashes.15
What are we to make of the numbers? To make a sound judgment would require long immersion in the field of traffic safety research, and a disinterested assessment. Both criteria would seem to be met by a team of academic researchers at Virginia Tech, led by the former technical director for safety and research development at the Federal Highway Administration, who concluded that “most speed zones were posted 15 mph below the ‘maximum safe speed,’ and suggested that increasing speed limits would help increase compliance and target only the most dangerous drivers.”16
IT IS CONVENTIONAL to frame the matter of speed limits as a tension between freedom and order that must be balanced. This seems roughly right. But the case of Germany is curious, and may lead one to question the necessity of such an opposition. A recent New York Times article pointed out that there are only a handful of places in the world without speed limits. Afghanistan and the Isle of Man are two, and the autobahn network of Germany is another. Yet Germany is a country that is famously rule bound and order obsessed in so many domains of life, with local officials dictating such things as the color of sun umbrellas. In some ways, the country resembles an American suburban development policed by the voluntary auxiliaries of a ruling Home Owners’ Association, the sort that go around measuring the height of people’s grass. Yet some significant minority of Germans routinely drive at more than a hundred miles an hour on their highways. Legally. Somehow these things cohere in the German personality. We will consider the origins of the autobahn, and the peculiar cultural conditions that make its unregulated speed workable, in the chapter titled “Road Rage, Other Minds, and the Traffic Community.” Here I just want to briefly note that a recent controversy over the autobahn offers another data point for my thesis that popular responses to speed enforcement can illuminate broader political currents.
The Times reports that “when a government-appointed commission in January [2019] dared to float the idea of a speed limit on the autobahn, the country’s storied highway network, it almost caused rioting . . . . Irate drivers took to the airwaves.”17 Such proposals get floated about once per decade in Germany, with similar results.
Germany’s drivers have long been politicized, as appears to be happening to the French at present. The issue of speed limits even prompted a rare show of solidarity between the Hun and the Gaul, those ancient enemies: with the proposed change to the autobahn, German labor leaders “menacingly put on their yellow vests, hinting at street protests.” Not wanting to become a hated, Macron-like figure, the transport minister, Andreas Scheuer, quickly backpedaled and declared that a highway speed limit was “contrary to every common sense.”
TRAFFIC COURT
Any speed above 80 mph counts as “reckless driving” in Virginia, even on highways where the speed limit is 70 mph. It is a Class 1 misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail. In 2016 the state senate considered a bill to raise the threshold from 80 to 85 mph. According to one local report, “Democratic Caucus Chair Don McEachin (Richmond), who is a personal injury lawyer, argued that it is dangerous to drive over 80 mph, and that the law should continue to reflect that . . . . ‘That is reckless driving. You are going faster than you could possibly go and be able to control your vehicle,’ he said.”18
Now, there surely exist motoring situations about which this could be said with a straight face, even by someone who is not a personal injury lawyer. If I picture Katharine Hepburn, tremulous yet dignified, driving a gravel truck at 80 mph on a twisty mountain road, I feel unsafe. But I was feeling just fine one sunny day in May as I cruised along a ruler-straight divided highway (Route 360), right up until I spotted the state trooper in the median strip and grabbed a handful of front brake. I was on my way back from Virginia International Raceway on a bike with triple disk brakes that weighs 8 percent of what a Chevy Suburban weighs, capable of generating perhaps twice the lateral cornering forces, with a width that is about one-third that of the highway lanes. He clocked me at 82 mph: reckless driving.
This was in Amelia County, one of those areas of rural Virginia where law enforcement appears to be the only viable industry. For these purposes, it is ideally situated on the route between Richmond and Virginia’s premiere road race course. The transition from an environment ruled by Newton’s laws to the realm of Virginia law takes time, and this presents an opportunity for law enforcement. Route 360 is indeed a “business corridor” for counties along the way, though not in the sense intended on the signs that announce it as such, to judge from the general desolation.
Such was my snide take on the matter until I showed up at the courthouse a couple of months later. There’s nothing like talk of jail time to wipe the arrogant look off a man’s face. I really did feel small, and damnably culpable, before the full majesty of the court. The gravity of the Commonwealth lay heavy in the room as the general cattle call of driving scofflaws loitering outside the building was admitted at 9:30 A.M. sharp by an extravagantly mustachioed sheriff wielding a wand. He waved his wand over the body of each person. (He said it was for detecting metal.) When we were seated he had a spiel to give, and he did so with the flourish of a carnival impresario. The room was packed to capacity, but as yet the judge was invisible. After a well-calibrated dramatic pause of some thirty minutes, during which there was nothing to do but silently contemplate the error of one’s ways (no cell phones allowed), the sheriff bellowed, “All rise!” A man in a robe walked in.
The first defendant was an African immigrant with a name the judge struggled to pronounce. The judge asked whether he wanted to plead guilty, not guilty, or no contest. He did not answer; the seconds passed. I believe he did not understand the question. The inquiry was repeated several times. Finally he mumbled something, and the judge moved on. Did he want to hire an attorney, represent himself, or request a state-appointed attorney? Again, the man was stumped. A form was waved at him. I must have spoken aloud because the woman next to me on the bench turned to me as my brain screamed, “Don’t sign it!”
I had been contacted by an attorney myself, one specializing in “reckless driving by speed” in certain counties. Was my citation public knowledge, even before a legal finding? I learned that the county shares its log of citations with lawyers who buy that list: another revenue stream. It would be interesting to know how often people actually go to jail for reckless driving by speed; perhaps the threat of jail is used to make the imposed fine seem like a bargain. My case was disposed with a fine of $150, which I paid with great relief.
In France before the Revolution, the crown granted commissions for collecting taxes to individuals who came to be known as tax farmers. They enjoyed wide discretion, and showed great initiative. They were permitted to keep a cut of the proceeds; it was a lucrative position to have. They were universally hated. What inspires revolutionary hatred, I believe, is not taxes themselves (unless you are a Tea Party fundamentalist), but rather the false pretense of interested parties acting under color of the public good.
Ticket farming in America would seem to be a variant on this. The authority invoked is not that of an insolvent monarchy, but rather that of a certain kind of moralism that mouths “safety” to trump every other concern, and points to the least competent among us to justify its standards. Obviously, such an orientation is fitting in some settings. I think America is exceptional and truly admirable in the way it accommodates those with physical and mental disabilities, for example. But precisely because this morality is so difficult to criticize, it provides a nearly nonrebuttable pretext for the expansion of an administrative state that has no limiting principle of its own, absent the forceful articulation of countervailing concerns that will necessarily look “irresponsible” by its lights. Left to its own internal logic, the regime of public safety must find ways to justify its own growing payroll, and its colonization of ever more domains of life. This can always be accomplished through further infantilization of its clients, under the banner of good democratic values.
IN JULY 2018, I found myself back in traffic court, this time in Fluvanna County. The sheriff got me with rear-firing radar, his cruiser tucked into a shady hollow on the shoulder. I grabbed a handful of brake on the Yamaha but knew I was toast as I passed him. Looking in my mirror, I pulled over as soon as I saw him motivate the big Mopar out of the ditch and onto the road. He said I was going “eighty-six and accelerating.” The speed limit was fifty-five. This was on Route 6, my usual corridor for east–west travel.
The officer was all right. He didn’t write it for reckless (they have discretion), and instead of eighty-six he wrote it for eighty-four, which I’m guessing brought it beneath some threshold of badness.
The courthouse in Palmyra sits next to the Old Stone Jail, built in 1828. You walk right past it on your way in, and it is hard not to notice the stockade that sits just outside. That’s right, a stockade: a wooden contraption that clamps around your neck and wrists, putting you into a hunched-over position, presumably to be jeered at by upstanding citizens and small children. Of course (you think to yourself) it’s historic, not part of the current repertoire of justice. Probably.
In the courtroom, I counted six officers of the Fluvanna County Sheriff’s Department with plank-like vests bulging beneath their shirts, coiled radio wires snaking from their belts to their lapels, and a full complement of weapons strapped to their waists. I tried to pick out my man, but it had been a couple of months. With their muscled-up bodies, shaved heads, and shar-pei-like neck folds that stood where a pony tail might have grown in another life, they looked like nothing so much as a superbutch leather gang. Somehow the sameness of them was the main effect of their presence, and it made the show of force more effective.
The judge, on the other hand, was an African-American woman. I was glad for this, for the simple reason that it was hard to imagine the cops and the judge meeting up at the Lions Club later to discuss law and order over a few drinks. Too often, the feeling you get in a courtroom is that there is this single thing, the State, that is arrayed against you. Of course, the way it is supposed to be is that there are two coequal parties, the cop and the defendant, who stand before a judge who privileges neither. It’s a nice idea, but as a sociological matter, the fact is that you have a bunch of civil servants who see one another regularly and develop professional courtesies among themselves. So there is something to be said for introducing a sociological divide of some sort between the cops and the judge, lest things get too collegial.
I pleaded nolo contendere but indicated that I would like to make a statement. It’s a little spiel I worked out for my Amelia County case, and would soon use again in Chesterfield County. You have to make last-minute adjustments to any such spiel after taking the temperature of the judge in the cases that are heard before your own, and the general vibe in the courtroom. It has to be super succinct. But I have also found that judges seem to appreciate it. Think about their day: an endless parade of sob stories, sullen indifference, and abject groveling. What they rarely get in traffic court is an argument, or an attempt at rhetoric—the stuff that presumably made them want to go to law school.
“Your Honor, the officer was perfectly professional [it is he that is on trial here], and I have no reason to question the calibration of his radar equipment [but I am going to mention the issue of calibration, while simultaneously waving it away magnanimously, as beneath the dignity of this court]. I am guilty as charged and won’t waste your time with excuses. But if you will permit me, I would like to say something on behalf of motorcyclists in general [like you, my concern is for the public interest].
“As research shows, and any trooper will tell you [I turn ever so slightly and glance at him—ultimately, we are on the same side here], distracted driving can be every bit as dangerous as driving while intoxicated. When you are riding a bike you are not texting, not looking at a navigation screen, not fussing with the kids in the backseat. You’re not doing anything but driving. And you have a lot of skin in the game—if you go down, it is literally your skin that comes off. So you are going to pay attention. Going eighty miles per hour on a motorcycle is different from doing so in a three-ton SUV that is loaded up with electronic gadgets, in terms of the hazard it poses to other motorists. I mention these facts not to suggest that motorcyclists should have their own speed limit [you say “not X” by way of insinuating the thought “X” into your auditor’s head, while distancing yourself from X as too radical for consideration by people as responsible as yourself], or be in some way above the law [the majesty of which is resplendent, as are those robes that fit you so smartly, Your Honor], but only in the hope that this larger context might enter into your judgment of what penalty is fitting in my own case.”
I would like to say I delivered this speech with the suavity of a Cicero. But in this case, as in Amelia, my voice was trembly and breathless, barely audible. You really do feel the gravity of the State in such a setting, and it affects your whole body. The judge listened with evident interest, and stated her appreciation for these considerations with warm sincerity. She then declined to reduce the charge in any way. But she pronounced her decision with a kindly beneficence that made me grateful merely to be in her presence. I don’t mean that sarcastically. Justice was done.
Outside the courthouse I put myself in the stockade and took a selfie.
THERAPY FOR DELINQUENTS
A couple of months later, it happened again. On the Chippenham Parkway, a divided six-lane highway, a man had hidden himself just over a rise on a Saturday afternoon, holding a gun nestled into the crook of his left arm that emitted invisible rays, he said. He also had a book of printed yellow forms. There appeared to be enough for everybody. On mine he wrote 77/55. Since I had collected a number of these over the past eighteen months, I was more receptive to the lawyers’ pitches that always show up in my mailbox after each infraction. After my last one, in Fluvanna County, I had briefly talked to a lawyer on the phone, but he wanted fifteen hundred dollars to take my case, so I had represented myself (an interesting locution) and now I had “eighty-four in a fifty-five” on my DMV rap sheet. But on this occasion, I received a flyer in the mail from a Mr. Joyner, Esq., who charged only $149. I talked to one of his associates on the phone, he took my case, and sure enough he got the ticket dismissed—on the judge’s condition that I complete a Basic Rider course.
The instructor had us sit on the little 250 cc bikes with our feet on the ground and rock back and forth, slowly, heel to toe and back again. Earlier, in the classroom, I had regressed to a too-cool-for-school posture, writing rude commentary on my workbook and discreetly showing it to the guy next to me, and generally playing the class clown. The situation just seemed to demand it. But now we were out in the parking lot, learning to feel “the friction zone,” where the clutch begins to engage. Worn out by the relentless negativity of my internal monologue, I had decided to change my attitude. I would approach this as an exercise in mindfulness. I tried to really feel the slippage of the clutch through the clutch lever, and be aware of my body and the bike as a unity. This worked; for about thirty minutes, I was able to think and act and feel more appropriately, as they say in school. We paddled slowly across the parking lot in unison with our feet on the ground, using them like training wheels. When we got to the far side, we each raised our left hand and kept it raised to show that we had completed the exercise. But as these exercises stretched out to fill the day, I soon found myself again engaged in an emotional struggle to keep my visible attitude one of compliance. I could not afford to get on the bad side of the two instructors, as I desperately needed the piece of paper they would give me after twenty hours of demonstrated appropriateness over two days. No wheelies, definitely.
Michel Foucault wrote a cultural history of punishment, the main point of which was that at some point in the eighteenth century, Western societies moved away from straightforward punishment (such as whippings or a stint in the stockade) toward what he called “discipline.” It takes a variety of institutional forms: prisons, compulsory schools, the factory, the asylum. The point of these is not just to punish but to produce a certain kind of “subject”—the personalities and forms of self-understanding that allow power to operate smoothly. One way this is accomplished is through the “unequal gaze.” There is a one-way-mirror quality to these disciplinary institutions; you can never be sure if, or when, you are being observed. In prisons this is accomplished through the architecture; in school, you can never be sure which infractions will end up on your “permanent record.” The natural features of the road are sometimes put to similar use by the safety-industrial complex: there could be a man with a ray gun behind that bush, or there could not be. Quite randomly, you may get busted for what would otherwise feel normal and natural. The only way to resolve the resulting anxiousness and insecurity is to internalize the demands of the institution; to become a different kind of person. For example, the kind for whom it feels right and natural to travel fifty-five miles per hour on an empty, six-lane divided highway. Of course, the disciplinary entity must not be too successful in this reeducation, as the point of the system is to produce delinquents. Without them, the whole apparatus would lack a rationale (and a budget). The rate of enforcement, as well as the gap between the speed limit and the speed dictated by our natural reasonableness, needs to be carefully calibrated to produce the optimal number of delinquents.
WHAT IS RECKLESS DRIVING?
Getting speeding tickets puts me in a libertarian mood, as you may have noticed. But just last night I had one of those experiences, increasingly frequent, that make me wish for more traffic enforcement, not less. On the Huguenot Parkway, a four-lane suburban thoroughfare with stoplights every half mile or so, I looked in the mirror of my Scion xB to see a car about three feet off my rear bumper. Traffic was light. The lane to my left was empty. He would follow like that for a hundred yards, then drop back, then rush forward and do the same, repeatedly. It was a Friday night, so it occurred to me he might be intoxicated. At the next light I managed to pull alongside him. A slight bluish glow illuminated his downcast face, upon which played an expression of rapt reverie in response to some experience emanating from his lap. I rolled down my window as I crept up beside him, my face full of indignation, and in doing so I nearly rolled into the car in front of me: an exquisite embarrassment that nearly nullified all my felt moral superiority at a stroke. But not quite. I exchanged some unkind words with the tailgater. In the following half mile, I noticed a woman alone in a minivan in the lane next to me gazing at her phone on her steering wheel, laughing out loud. I felt surrounded, and desperate for the exercise of public authority against reckless driving.
Yet I believe there is no law one could pass, no public service announcement or educational campaign one could undertake, that would get people off the stuff. The impressively successful campaign against drunk driving in the 1980s is often invoked to demonstrate that cultural norms can be shifted. But drinking is done largely in a social setting, prior to getting behind the wheel. A gathering of friends or coworkers is a setting in which norms come into play, and social pressure is felt. The self-contained automobile cockpit, on the other hand, feels like a private space. Here, the power of shame is a weak lever of social reform.
The empowered moral isolation we feel in our cars is like that of an anonymous online comments section, which similarly generates antisocial behavior. But that isolation is illusory. We are hurtling toward one another, not in the cloud, but in sheet metal containers of gasoline and flesh, separated in our trajectories only by the gossamer conventions of painted lines on the pavement.
So powerful are the attractions of the screen, and so weak is the spirit of public concern at this late stage of the liberal-democratic experiment, that I believe the remedy for distracted driving can only be technological. Driverless cars represent one approach. It is an approach that demands massive expenditures and promises to accomplish a massive transfer of wealth (much of it into the coffers of the same parties who created the problem).
For this reason, it is the only approach that attracts speculative venture capital, and the endorsement of a political establishment (of both parties) that is largely captured.
There are other technological solutions that are simple and cheap; it would be a relatively trivial matter to disable specific functions on a smartphone while its owner is driving, and in fact the Apple iPhone now does this, to the credit of the firm. (Though this safety feature is overridden with a single touch at the prompt “I’m not driving.”) Implementation of stronger technical controls on distracted driving would require only a bit of will to exercise stewardship over the common good by public servants who were hired to do just that. It would also require a tiny bit of deference to the common good by corporations whose charters—their very existence and legal privileges—are granted by the laws of the state, however much their executives regard them as sovereign entities. But, compared to driverless cars, such modest technical remedies for distracted driving offer nobody the prospect of extracting further wealth from the citizenry, and therefore enjoy little prospect.