Traffic Life : Passionate Tales and Exit Strategies
Edited by Stephan Wehner
An Anthology
 
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176 Traffic Zoology You see, a distributed animal with human components can be very sensitive to perturbations from within. It is only when the conflicting threads of goals, reasoning and compe- tition between individual human minds are quietened into the background noise that the soil can truly be ripe to raise a complex beast. When drivers can fall into a semi-hypnotic state and their herd instincts take over, the seeds are laid for something greater. Habitat. While there are thousands of traffic animal breed- ing grounds along the paved networks of the world, only one driving region has been extensively explored at this time, due largely to budgetary considerations. The TransCanada Highway is a nearly ideal environment for the production of large-scale ATA phenomena, due in great part to the simplicity of its shape: all cars are mov- ing either westbound or eastbound, streamlining the goals of the drivers in much the same way as the shape of the Daytona superspeedway encourages drafting partnerships. Also, because there are long stretches through lonely wilder- ness and semi-tundra, nascent traffic animals have a long period in which to mature before coming against obstacles like influxes of new cars or navigating around towns; and because the highway wends its way directly through most of Canada's major cities, it provides a handy litmus test for the homeostatic integrity of a given specimen simply by ob- serving whether or not it makes it through to the other side of the urban area intact. While daytime ATA formation is not rare, it is under the cover of darkness that development can proceed in a com- paratively unfettered fashion. This is due in large part to the more abstract, disconnected experience of interacting with other vehicles merely as points of coloured light. Fa- miliar prejudices and stereotypes-potential sources of de- structive competition-are smoothed out by the shadows. At least on the basis of visual impressions, a station-wagon and a sportscar can enter a system as peers. Diminished visibility caused by mild to moderate weather conditions can have a similarly equalising effect, but when
  
Matthew Frederick Davis Hemming 177 conditions become too severe, drivers tend to clump into packs for safety, leading to pseudo-ATA fleets that are all too conscious social events (as in the Quintana Roo experi- ence). Show me an autumn stretch of prairie transcontinental highway at twilight, and I will show you the secret zoo of the road. Typical Morphologies. The most basic form of multi-car life is the Asipetal Caterpillar, also known as a worm. Worms begin when a stable solo vehicle spawns a linear, single-lane chain of vehicles composed of loose monomers joining at the rear (a closely related, but dysfunctional, construct known as an Acropetal Caterpillar grows by adding vehicles to the front of the chain, generally leading to destructive diffu- sion or autolysis). Short, lithe worms are the fundamental building blocks of healthy ATA tissue. Perverse, long-form worms are the seeds of congestion and death. The second atomic element of ATA tissue stands in stark contrast to the worm, for it is a fleeting thing, and when it takes concrete form at all it is often manifested as a single car. The Apparent Coxswain is a vehicle that appears, to the conscious or semi-conscious mind of one or more drivers, to be a leader of the worm. When the Apparent Coxswain changes lanes, there is a higher probability that a majority of the worm will follow suit than if the change were initiated by a less trusted vehicle. In many cases each car in a worm perceives the car immediately ahead of it to be the Apparent Coxswain, leading to domino-effect lane-transitions; such formations have high homeostatic integrity because of the worm's ability to 'find a new head' should one Apparent Coxswain be lost to the currents. (Please note: the Apparent Coxswain should not be confused with the Virtual Coxswain or the Napoleonic Coxswain, discussed below.) Formations that achieve such integration become Choling- ers: Asipetal Caterpillars with tightly-integrated internal feedback systems of Apparent Coxswains, capable of trans- mitting information from tip to tail with high fidelity. Chol- ingers can slither to avoid torn tyres on the road, twitch

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