MANNERS & MORALS: The Last Traffic Jam

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Congress and state legislatures had appropriated millions to build super highways on which speeders could kill themselves at higher speeds. The traffic light, the yellow line, the parking lot, the parking meter, the underground garage, the one-way street, the motorcycle cop and the traffic ticket had all blossomed amid the monoxide fumes—and traffic had gone right on getting thicker and noisier year by year.

Unabashed, last week men were still dreaming up panaceas. Only occasionally did they have a wild and honest ring, as when William J. Gottlieb, president of the Automobile Club of New York, jokingly suggested closing down all bridges and tunnels leading to Manhattan and declaring a state of siege. For the most part, man still pinned his hopes on the traffic tag and public works. New York's Police Commissioner Arthur Wallander thought things could be improved if taxicabs were shortened.

Man steadfastly refused to see that nothing could solve the traffic evil but the fast-multiplying automobile itself. The problem would end for good on the day of the last traffic jam—at that shrieking moment when every highway, street, road and lane in the nation was so clogged with cars that none could ever move again. Only then would man be free of the monster. But would he accept his freedom? It seemed doubtful. It would be too easy to lay boards across the tops of a billion sedans and start all over again with jet propulsion, foam rubber wheels and special lighters for the motorist's neon-trimmed opium pipe.