The City: Dawn Skid

THE CITY

The two-car family—once an American dream—is now being superseded by the three-car, and eventually perhaps the four-car family. This has resulted in ever better expressways to move the traffic faster and faster and add to modern man's wheeled conveni ence. Of course, everybody takes advantage of the new convenience, which means that those who really want to get to work on time have to get up at 5 a.m. to beat the traffic.

That is what Martin Greenhouse, 39, did one day last week, and he was tooling along Manhattan's East River Drive on his way to his job as electrical supervisor at Brooklyn's Navy Yard just as dawn was breaking around 6 o'clock. There was a slight glaze of icy snow on the road, and at a turn just south of 96th Street, Martin's car skidded into a lazy U-turn.

The result was cacophonous. A car behind Martin smashed into him and spun sideways. Brakes squealing, slewing in the slush like slalom racers, car after car piled helplessly into the snarl. When things finally skidded to a stop, 34 cars were locked in a tangled mass, blocking the expressway from curb to curb—and providing a classic picture of what happens in modern civilization when the slightest thing goes wrong.

For it is the nature of high-speed expressways that the slightest obstruction, like a pebble in a rifle barrel, creates chaos. Martin's skid jammed traffic for ten miles, blocked the highway for three hours.

It also created a monumental problem for insurance companies. Sometimes the driver of the first car sues the driver of the second, who sues the third, who sues the fourth, who sues . .