The Inimitable Tiff

Tom Vanderbilt, who also runs “How We Drive” which I link to a lot:

Given Twitter’s particular genius for broadcasting micro-narratives of no particular consequence (Will that friend of yours get on that next flight to Spokane? Oh, will that grocery line ever budge?), it’s little surprise that conversation about traffic—the liturgy of complaints, the minor revelations, the rare piece of useful information, the grinding banality of it all, or even the joy of not being in it—is such a staple of the site.

There are the local DOTs or Road Authorities bleating out a stream of salting advisories and local closures, often revealing some small kernel about the nature of a place. Consider Transport for London, with English officiousness, alerting its followers: “Western Avenue / A40 (Hillingdon): Eastbound direction. Lane one restriction to facilitate cyclic cleaning.” Dispatches from self-appointed traffic authorities can be telling too; note this one from @mumbaitraffic: “Qualis and BEST bus in a fight on Southbound Peddar road near the Dominos … blows being exchanged.” Some, like @sydneytraffic, are simply bots that channel official incident feeds to Twitter.

…

…As a kind of samizdat language of the road, the tweets about traffic evoke an earlier, now largely forgotten form—CB radio—which is associated with truckers but once had a kind of underground network of users among everyday drivers. In Kenneth Tynan’s masterful mid-1970s profile of Johnny Carson, there’s a moment where the talk-show host tells the playwright he ripped the CB radio out of his car: “I just couldn’t bear it—all those sick anonymous maniacs shooting off their mouths.” Tynan, in a passage that anticipates the Internet (and Twitter), wrote: “I understand what he means. Most of what you hear on CB radio is either tedious (truck drivers warning one another about speed traps) or banal (schoolgirls exchanging notes on homework), but at its occasional—and illegal—worst it sinks a pipeline to the depths of the American unconscious.”

Also interesting about the article is a Tweet quoted in Spanish, without translation.  I like that.