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Can Anyone Solve the Problem of Traffic? From The New Yorker
It was early in the afternoon on Friday, May 24th, or "getaway day," as Channel 7 called it--the start of the Memorial Day weekend and the traditional beginning of the summer traffic season. On days like this, all the drivers who commute in and out of New York City on a typical weekday are joined by the drivers who live in the city and use their cars only on weekends, producing the kind of chaos that traffic reporters in Atlanta or Los Angeles take for granted but New York reporters don't experience every day. If there were truly appalling delays, Sohn had a shot at leading the six-o'clock news. "As a helicopter reporter, that's what you want," she said. "To be first." Helicopter reporters in New York don't have the luxury of following high-speed car chases-there are too many bridges and tunnels in the way. Here a terrible traffic jam is as good as it gets. But would today's traffic be bad enough? Since September 11th, as anyone who drives in New York knows, traffic patterns have changed. Congestion cleared up when Mayor Giuliani used his special emergency powers to restrict bridge and tunnel crossings into Manhattan below Sixtieth Street. Not since the Second World War had traffic in the city flowed as freely. In April, restrictions were lifted on some crossings, but morning-rush-hour restrictions on lone drivers entering Manhattan remained in effect below Fourteenth Street. Although the cleanup operation at Ground Zero has now ended, Mayor Bloomberg--who, during his campaign, promised to improve the quality of life in New York by making the city less auto-reliant--says that he will keep the restrictions in place while the reconstruction of lower Manhattan continues. Traffic has been getting steadily worse since April, but it's still less crowded in the city now than it was a year ago. Linden Airport is near Elizabeth, New Jersey, and just south of Newark airport. As we headed northwest across Newark's sprawling runways, Sohn gathered information from the traffic-news desk. Around noon, a twelve-year-old boy called Scottie Van Dunk, of Mahwah, New Jersey, whose class had been let out of school early, had ridden his bike to a section of the Ramapo River known as "The Forty Foot," a well-known swimming hole just across the New York state line. At 2 P.M., the boy's body had been discovered at the spot where the river runs beside the Thruway. He had drowned, and police officers had shut down the highway for the recovery operation. By the time we arrived above the scene, at 2:15 P.M., the traffic on the northbound Thruway was backed up for several miles beyond the I-287 interchange. Drivers who had been zipping along the highway minutes before were now trapped and unhappy, and their previously limitless sense of possibility had shrunk to a single option: whether to change lanes. The idea that the delay up ahead might be the result of a disaster far greater than anyone's personal inconvenience rarely occurs to the driver stuck in traffic. NewsCopter 7's remote-controlled belly-mounted camera roved the river's edge, looking for a body or some other pitiless image of tragedy for the folks at home, but found only a couple of men from the Stony Point Fire Department, stowing rescue gear. Van Dunk's body had been taken away just before we arrived. Sohn directed Anderson to get some pictures of the traffic jam on I-87 and I-287, but said she doubted that this tie-up would be enough to make the six-o'clock news: "For that to happen, we need some really, really bad traffic."
What can you do about the traffic? Take the train? The train may be out of commission; Amtrak, the nation's passenger rail service, may be out of business before too long. Fly? Airlines are cutting flights and raising prices to offset heavy losses. Manage traffic better? There are many schemes for managing traffic, but not very many practical ways to reduce the number of vehicles on the roads. Even if people have an alternative to driving, as do many New Yorkers, over time an ever larger number of commuters choose to drive. Today, about 3.6 million people make their way into Manhattan's "hub" (the area below Sixtieth Street) each workday--about the same number who came on an average day fifty years ago. In 1948, six hundred and fifty thousand of the commuters drove; fifty years later, more than 1.3 million of them drove, and most of them drove alone. It's not enough to build public transportation; you also have to get people to use it, either by making trains and buses more convenient or by prohibiting some people from driving during peak periods. But in the United States restricting people from using their automobiles whenever they like has always been politically difficult, and Mayor Bloomberg's efforts to do so are controversial. The new restrictions have brought joy to many of the city's residents--New York is the only city in the United States in which the majority of households don't own an automobile--but they have been a source of outrage for the parking-garage industry, restaurant and theatre owners, retailers, labor groups, and some local politicians. Traffic is bad, but, as some New Yorkers have discovered, a lack of traffic may be worse. "I think it's destroying the fabric of New York," Greg Susick, senior vice-president of Central Parking, told the Times in November. After a Christmas season in New York in which the traditional Five Days of Gridlock saw only light congestion, the Metropolitan Parking Association began investigating possible legal action against the city for maintaining the lone-driver restrictions. If New York could do something permanent about its traffic, maybe other cities around the country could, too. In Atlanta, the time that the average commuter spends annually in traffic rose from twenty-five hours in 1992 to seventy hours in 2000. Los Angeles has the worst traffic in the country, but San Francisco, Houston, and Seattle are challenging L.A. for this distinction. These cities may find it necessary to impose restrictions on driving when traffic becomes even worse--much worse--as it inevitably will. That is why what happens in New York's experiment in traffic control is so important. Will New York, which is planning to build a state-of-the-art transit center in lower Manhattan, be the first city to implement a state-of-the-art traffic policy? Or will this period in the city's traffic history--a period in which the automobile is a privileged guest--end in the coming months, defeated by our insatiable desire to drive?
Traffic seemed to be flowing well, Popolizio reported. He suspected that a lot of people hadn't gone to work. "We may see an early peak today--around two o'clock," he told me over the phone. "But so far traffic is O.K. I'm looking at the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge camera, and traffic is moving well." The Traffic Management Center is in a large windowless bunker in a nondescript white brick building just off Queens Plaza, in Long Island City. I had met Popolizio there when I visited several months earlier. He and the other engineers work in the glow of thirty-four large TV monitors, each displaying changing images transmitted from the hundred and thirty remote-controlled closed-circuit cameras that the city and state D.O.T.s have installed at troublesome intersections within the city and at common choke points outside it. Traffic cams reduce the D.O.T.'s response time to accidents--the cause of fifty per cent of all traffic jams. In theory, the cams, available online at www.metrocommute.com, are supposed to provide an advance-warning system for the public, but, as a practical matter, most drivers aren't surfing the Web, you hope, while they're behind the wheel. More than half of the eleven and a half thousand signals in the five boroughs are connected to computers in the management center, and the city's traffic engineers can manipulate the timing of those signals throughout the day. During the morning and evening rush hours, for example, Sixth Avenue in midtown gets sixty seconds of the green time while the crosstown streets get thirty seconds, but during the middle of the day, when there's more crosstown traffic, the engineers change the signal timing so that both Sixth Avenue and the crosstown streets get forty-five seconds of green. Every one of Manhattan's signals is represented by a tiny light on a forty-foot-long tableau in the management center, and the lights are connected in real time to the signals on the streets. The model allows you to watch the sequences of lights sweeping along Broadway, or to study the subtlety of the signal pattern in Times Square. It represents the triumph of traffic engineering over traffic: a perfectly designed system, without drivers to mess it up. "We use very few left-turn signals in the city," Popolizio pointed out. "It's not like in the suburbs, where you have people going every which way in the intersections." The day I had visited the management center, in March, there wasn't much traffic to manage. With all the rush-hour restrictions still in effect, the roads in the city and outside it were quieter than usual; an engineer had tuned one of the monitors to daytime TV. Finally, at the end of the morning rush hour, a crew from the city's Department of Environmental Protection stopped its truck in the middle of the southbound F.D.R. Drive, just south of Ninety-sixth Street, so that it blocked two lanes. The men got out, ambled over to the side of the road, and began peering into drains. Cars behind the truck immediately stopped, and, thanks to the D.O.T.'s cameras, we got to see the jam forming, travelling backward at eight miles an hour, a rolling wave of thwarted commuter desire which soon reached the Triborough Bridge. Meanwhile, a police car pulled up, its lights flashing, in the left lane of the northbound F.D.R., and the cops went over to see what the heck the D.E.P. was up to. It was a pygmy traffic jam, in the general scheme of things, but it was the only thing happening that morning, and the D.O.T. engineers got pretty excited. "What are those D.E.P. guys doing?" one shouted. "Do they have a work permit?" Fifteen minutes later, the truck moved on, and the jam slowly cleared. On getaway day, Popolizio told me, "We're going to be putting in our outbound timing progressions a little early this afternoon, maybe at one-thirty to two instead of three-thirty to four, to give more green time to the outbound lights. All to help get people out of the city as smoothly as possible."
But not building highways also causes traffic. The section of I-95 that runs from the New York state line to New Haven, for example, was designed to accommodate seventy thousand vehicles a day; it now carries more than a hundred and fifty thousand in places. Many parts of the nation's forty-seven-thousand-mile interstate-highway system, which was created in the nineteen-fifties, suffer similar overloads. Politically, it's almost impossible to build major new roads. David Schulz, the director of the Infrastructure Technology Institute, at Northwestern University, said recently, "When you talk about building a new road, the number of people who benefit will be large, but their individual benefit will be quite small. The number of people who will be harmed will be small, but their disbenefit will be very large. And it's those people who will get involved in the public hearings and stop the road." NIMBY ("Not in my back yard") has given birth to BANANA ("Build almost nothing anywhere near anyone"), which has spawned NOPE ("Not on planet Earth"). The Federal Highway Administration has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade to make highways "intelligent," deploying a wide range of detection devices known collectively as I.T.S. (intelligent transportation systems), which are supposed to track, predict, and possibly control traffic. Much of this technology was developed by the United States military and used during the Gulf War. (It is now part of our new homeland security measures.) It includes closed-circuit television cameras, vehicle sensors buried in the roads, overhead proximity radar, optical-image sensors, and the E-Z Pass transponder-the small plastic box on your windshield which communicates with overhead "readers," and which may be the most significant advance in traffic management since the traffic signal. Mark Hallenbeck, the director of the Washington State Transportation Center, at the University of Washington, says that the idea "is to add capacity with information, the way we used to add capacity with concrete. In highway agencies, we used to think of ourselves as being in the construction business. We build a road, go away, and then come back in twenty years and add a lane. Now all these agencies are having to learn how to increase capacity by adding intelligence to the system." On Friday afternoon, after I had spoken to Popolizio, I called Transcom, a public interagency traffic-management organization based in Jersey City, to find out what was happening on the roads outside the city. Part of Transcom's mission is to coordinate information about I-95 which is supplied by the states that the road runs through. Traffic, after all, doesn't respect city or country boundaries. Today, Transcom's managers told me, they were busy alerting travellers to problems on the highway that had started hours earlier, at Exit 34, near Milford, Connecticut. At 6:30 A.M., a tractor-trailer on I-95 northbound, carrying a load of car batteries, had hit a guardrail, overturned, and caught fire. The state police closed all lanes, in both directions, while they cut apart the truck and made sure no battery acid remained on the highway--a process that took eight hours. By noon, traffic was backed up for thirteen miles. Information about the delays was posted on electronic message signs mounted over the region's highways, and alerts were broadcast over highway-advisory radio. At the moment, Transcom does not provide drivers with alternate routes, but, according to its executive director, Matthew Edelman, "Lots of these drivers know the roads, and if you tell them where the problem is they'll figure out how to get around it." This is assuming, of course, that drivers do what the system tells them to do. Dave Zavattero, the I.T.S. program manager for the Illinois Department of Transportation, says that many drivers deliberately do the opposite. "We have variable signs on the Kennedy and Dan Ryan Expressways," in Chicago, he told me. "The signs tell you whether the local lanes or the express lanes are moving faster. But if I put a message up there that says the express lanes are five minutes faster a certain number of drivers will figure that the other drivers are taking the express lanes, so they're going to take the local lanes." On this getaway day, any drivers heading out of New York early to avoid the afternoon rush hour who had checked the traffic cams and bulletins on the Web just before leaving would have known to take the Hutchinson River Parkway north to the Merritt Parkway, skirting the jam on I-95. But in fact the Hutch wasn't much better. Around noon, a truck driver had attempted an illegal dash along the parkway (which is off limits to commercial traffic) to avoid the problems on I-95 and got stuck under one of the overpasses. This meant that by 1 P.M. all the New England-bound travellers that Popolizio and his colleagues were helping to leave the city were about to find two of the principal northbound routes blocked, and, as we saw from the helicopter, by 2:15 P.M. a third--the northbound New York State Thruway--was a parking lot, too.
NewsCopter 7 was on the scene, hovering over the Brooklyn Bridge, taking pictures of the police activity below. "Here comes the bomb squad," Anderson said, zooming in on the truck. At 4:45 P.M., while the police were searching the Brooklyn Bridge (they found only a stray knapsack), a car caught fire inside the Lincoln Tunnel, closing the Manhattan-bound lanes and creating congestion on the eastern spur of the New Jersey Turnpike. NewsCopter 7 flew across the river to check out the fire, but there was nothing much to photograph. "Car fires make great pictures--if you can get to them in time," Sohn said. "The problem is that the Fire Department puts out car fires so fast." Sohn and her pilot had a hunch that the George Washington Bridge was their best bet for the six-o'clock news, so we headed up there shortly after 5 P.M., stopping once along the way to record a few "beauty shots" of the city skyline, which would be used to lead into the weather report. Sohn was careful to keep traffic out of the pictures. "Traffic is not what they're looking for in a beauty shot," she said. As we came up to the bridge, we saw the jam: a solid line of traffic stretching from the New Jersey Turnpike to the bridge's toll plazas, then east all the way across the Cross-Bronx Expressway and north into Westchester County. The Major Deegan, the Grand Concourse, the Sheridan, and the Bruckner were also packed with cars and trucks. Only the traffic on the bridge was moving--the part you'd expect to be the most congested--offering travellers a brief respite between jams. "Look at that," Sohn said admiringly. She directed Anderson to hover over Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, where I-95 joins I-80 and swings east for its approach to "the George"-and where she could get the best shots. She sent some of these pictures to Channel 7 and waited. It was almost six. Removing her lollipop, Sohn positioned the onboard "lipstick camera," mounted on the instrument console, so that it was pointed at her face, ready to go live at the top of the hour if she was called upon.
Traffic engineering is the science of maximizing throughput. What makes traffic jams hard to understand, at least within traditional traffic-engineering practice, is that they tend to occur around the time that the road is performing according to the engineers' peak specification. One important development in understanding this "nonlinear" phenomenon came in 1992, when Kai Nagel and Michael Schreckenberg, two physicists at the University of Cologne, in Germany, began to apply a computational technique known as "cellular automata" (or C.A.) to traffic. In a C.A. model, highway capacity is represented as a two-dimensional grid. Each cell in the grid has one of two "states": empty or occupied by a particle, which in this case is a car. Unlike traditional mathematical models used by traffic engineers, where it is assumed that all drivers are the same, in a C.A. model the particles can be assigned values intended to represent different types of drivers: fast drivers, slow drivers, tailgaters, and lane changers can all be represented in the model. The result is virtual traffic. Using a variety of computer techniques, engineers can build virtual roads on computers, add virtual cars to them, and sit back and watch what happens. K.L.D. Associates, of Huntington Station, Long Island, sent me a simulation program for lower Manhattan, and I spent a morning watching virtual traffic flow up and down the West Side Highway. K.L.D. is also using traffic modeling to plan evacuation scenarios for possible events like a terrorist attack on the Indian Point nuclear facility, in Buchanan, New York. "We work with ten different levels of driver aggressiveness," Mayer Horn, K.L.D.'s vice-president, told me. "Also, we take into account that people who drive during the week drive more aggressively than those who drive only on the weekend--Sunday drivers." Computer modeling has made it possible to study traffic not only as a physical system but as a social system, and several notable papers have appeared that explore the relationship between driver behavior and traffic jams. Two researchers, Donald Redelmeier, of the University of Toronto, and Robert Tibshirani, of Stanford, used computer modeling to demonstrate that changing lanes in traffic doesn't help, although it may seem to the lane changer that he is making progress. In a paper in Nature, the authors argued that this is because drivers mistakenly judge their progress relative to other drivers rather than to the over-all time of the trip, and because drivers make decisions to change lanes based on short intervals, during which the other lane may move faster, rather than on longer intervals, in which the slower lane speeds up. The authors concluded that drivers change lanes for emotional reasons; namely, that they prefer overtaking to being overtaken. Their theory was recently contested by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy lecturer at Yale University, who argues in a short paper entitled "Cars in the Next Lane Really Do Go Faster" that certain lanes do move more slowly and the reason is that there are actually more cars in them, and that only by drivers' changing lanes can the highway as a whole reach equilibrium and maximum throughput. After ten years of traffic analysis using C.A. models, Kai Nagel and his European colleagues have concluded that traffic jams can occur for almost any reason at all. A slight upgrade in the roadway, a light rain, or even a single road-rager getting cut off by a Sunday driver can provide the trigger for a traffic jam. Someone brakes, forcing the driver behind to brake harder, and the shock wave is sent backward through the traffic until eventually someone comes to a standstill. The Germans' gloomy position--that traffic jams will occur no matter how ingenious traffic managers are--is not popular with the engineers I have met around New York. "That stuff may work on the Autobahn," John Tipaldo, of the city's D.O.T., told me, "but not here. New York's traffic may be crazy, but it's not that crazy."
In his "traffic forecast," which appears six times a week in the News, opposite the weather, Schwartz is the voice of every traffic-savvy driver who knows to avoid the Gowanus and the B.Q.E. by cutting through Brooklyn. His followers observe Sam's traffic calendar, which is an ecumenical mix of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim holidays during which alternate-side-of-the-street parking is suspended. If Gridlock Sam's column was your only source of news, you'd have a pretty fair idea of what was going on around the city--the visiting dignitaries, celebrity-studded benefits, parades, political demonstrations, out-of-state lotto jackpots, block parties, and sports events in the area. Gridlock Sam has made traffic his world view. Schwartz was New York City's traffic commissioner for most of the nineteen-eighties, and during his storied career as a public servant he displayed a flair for the dramatic that is not the rule among traffic engineers. He was responsible for the "Don't Even Think of Parking Here" signs in midtown, and his anti-gridlock "Don't Block the Box" initiative created a lasting improvement in traffic flow. He waged war on "sitters," especially the limos waiting for fat cats to finish their power breakfasts in midtown hotels. The drivers didn't care about the thirty-five-dollar tickets they received for sitting (some of them even said thank you, which spooked the traffic agents), so Schwartz got the city to make sitting a moving violation, for which a driver incurs points on his license. Schwartz ticketed Mayor Koch's car for illegal parking while they were having lunch together, revoked the parking spot of the archbishop of New York, which was next to St. Patrick's Cathedral (it caused backups on Fifth Avenue and East Fiftieth Street), and had a TV-news van towed while the crew was interviewing him. But his finest hour was his assault on illegally parked cars with diplomatic plates. Not only did Schwartz ticket these cars; he began towing them, which caused an uproar in the diplomatic community. A special session of more than a hundred delegates to the U.N. was convened to meet with the traffic commissioner. The Russians cited the Geneva Convention, which they claimed guaranteed the right to free parking. The French said it was possible that the entire U.N. might move to Vienna if the diplomats didn't get their parking privileges back. But Schwartz was unmoved, and kept up his assault until, a week or so later, the United States State Department informed him that American diplomats in Norway and Togo had lost their parking privileges, and that to avert an international crisis Schwartz should consider refocusing his energies. "What I've learned from experience," he told me, "is that in New York people will go a long way to keep their parking privileges." One fine afternoon this spring, Schwartz took me for a drive around Manhattan. We drove in his car, a Volvo, which he keeps in a lot on Lafayette Street. We headed uptown, looking for some traffic. "I can't understand it," Schwartz said several times, shaking his head, as we sailed up Park Avenue South. "You never see it like this." We cut over to Madison Avenue; it was rush hour--surely we'd find some traffic there. Instead, we surfed along on the D.O.T.'s signal progression, and even made the light at Forty-second Street. Schwartz took no pleasure in these minor miracles. Without traffic, Gridlock Sam wasn't quite himself. Finally, on Forty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth--the diamond district--Schwartz perked up. He began pointing out traffic violators. "Sitter. Sitter. Diplomat. Sitter--he's a Supreme Court judge, according to the plate." Up in front of us, traffic was squeezing into one lane to get around a "Mitzvah mobile," which is used by the Lubavitcher community in Brooklyn to transport people to the diamond district, and which had a large picture of their late spiritual leader Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson painted on its side. Just as we were taking our place in the queue--bang!--the Volvo shuddered. The driver of the S.U.V. behind us, locked in a battle with the driver of the Town Car beside him over who was going to get around the Mitzvah bus first, had struck Gridlock Sam's rear bumper. But the S.U.V. driver didn't seem to notice. Or perhaps he didn't care. At any rate, the event delighted Gridlock Sam: "He doesn't even know he hit me!" Since this spring, traffic in the city has grown steadily worse--or better, depending on your point of view. When I spoke to Gridlock Sam the other day, he reported that the level of congestion was about where it had been in the mid-nineties. "It's not where it was at the height of the economic boom," he said. "But we're close." He was trying to sound dire about this, but I could detect a note of joy in his voice.
The economic solution to traffic jams is to price roads the way we price other limited resources. Just as air travelers pay a premium to fly during peak periods, so car travelers should pay a premium to drive during times when everyone else wants to drive, such as the Friday before Labor Day. This form of traffic management, which is called "congestion pricing" (although its promoters like to call it "value pricing," because that sounds better), is a relatively easy system to implement; the technology necessary for it to work already exists, in the form of the E-Z Pass. Politically, the idea is a harder sell. (They're not called freeways for nothing.) But there are signs that congestion pricing is beginning to influence traffic management, and nowhere in North America is this more evident than in New York. A year ago, the Port Authority began using congestion pricing in the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, on the George Washington Bridge, and on the three New Jersey-Staten Island bridges; drivers crossing the Hudson, eastbound, at peak hours pay five dollars, while drivers at other times pay four. (Drivers without E-Z Pass always pay six.) The New Jersey Turnpike also uses congestion pricing. A form of congestion pricing is already in effect for parking, thanks to the new European-style Muni-Meters (the blue boxes that print tickets for display on your dashboard, which are replacing parking meters around the city). Four East River crossings, however, remain free. This may be the single most irrational traffic-management practice in New York City: there is actually an economic incentive for a Long Island driver traveling to New Jersey to go through Manhattan, one of the most congested places on earth, rather than through Brooklyn and Staten Island, because the former trip costs nothing while the latter costs seven dollars--the price of the toll on the southbound Verrazano Narrows Bridge. City planners have long argued for tolls, and Mayors Lindsay, Koch, and Dinkins all wanted them but could not build the coalition of city and state politicians necessary to implement them. Bloomberg floated the idea of East River tolls last spring, in his budget proposal, and he has been meeting privately with politicians and business leaders to gather support for the idea, and many observers think he will endorse the tolls publicly after the gubernatorial election this fall. Bloomberg also has the economic imperative of a budget deficit of five billion dollars. If New Yorkers are faced with the choice between losing city services (closing libraries, cutting back the number of police officers, adding more children to already overcrowded classrooms) and paying tolls on the East River bridges, many might choose the second option. Instituting tolls on the East River and Harlem River bridges with E-Z Pass would, in effect, create what's known as a "cordon"--an electronic necklace of sensors surrounding the hub below Sixtieth Street. Singapore and Oslo have built cordons, and they are planned for other European cities, including London. If Mayor Ken Livingstone has his way, beginning on February 17, 2003, any nonresident entering central London between 7 A.M. and 6:30 P.M., Monday to Friday, will have to pay a toll of five pounds per vehicle. Once a cordon is in place, it can be used to restrict or regulate entry to a city--or to any neighborhood, for that matter--in many ways. Vehicles could be charged according to how much time they spend inside the city; residents could be charged differently from out-of-towners; those driving a single-occupancy vehicle could be charged more than carpoolers; and if the S.O.V. is an S.U.V. the driver could be charged more than someone in a compact.
"All right!" Sohn said. "O.K., Shannon, to you in thirty seconds," a voice in the headphones said. "I'm getting skid in the shot," Sohn said to Anderson, indicating the landing gear, and he angled the chopper downward so that the viewers at home would have an unobstructed view of the full horror of I-95. Just before the news began, Channel 7 ran a car commercial. It showed a Jeep Grand Cherokee cruising along an empty road somewhere in the dreamscape of automotive fantasy. Then the clarions sounded, announcing the start of "Eyewitness News." "Shannon, what's it like out there?" one of the anchors asked. Sohn reported that it was very bad indeed--"an unbelievable bumper-to-bumper jam leading from the George all the way up to the toll plaza at the New Jersey Turnpike--a solid hour-and-a-half delay," she said. She gave a rundown of the other traffic nightmares the city had suffered, and concluded, "This may be the worst holiday traffic I've ever seen." "Thanks, Shannon," the anchor said when the spot ended. It was comforting to know that New York was getting back to normal. At 6:15 P.M., NewsCopter 7 was whirring back to Linden Airport. The sun was sinking toward Kittatinny Mountain, in northwestern New Jersey, and the hazy summer light was smudging the edges of Manhattan's skyline. It had been a terrible day for traffic, but a good day--"a five-lollipop day"--for Shannon Sohn. "What's the next worst traffic you've seen?" I asked Sohn as we were once again flying over Newark. "Yesterday," she said. "Yesterday was horrible." How was she going to get away this weekend? "I'm going to ride my horse," she said.
Copyright (c) John Seabrook 2003. All rights reserved
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