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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Lockdowns and the Open Road

The pandemic has given us a temporary, artificial taste of an American myth.
50-no-traffic

Back in March, a couple of days before Virginia’s shelter-in-place order came down, I took a day trip to complete a photo essay I had been working on. Already the roads were quite empty; in addition to enjoying a traffic-free cruise down U.S. 50 heading into Washington, D.C., I was even able to stand in the middle of the highway and snap pictures looking down the asphalt expanse.

During the peak of the lockdown period, and continuing even today, lots of usually crowded roads, whether local arterials, major U.S. Highways, or Interstates, have been dramatically emptied. In case you haven’t been driving much since March, we’re not talking 20 or 30mph instead of standstill backups. We’re talking all-green lines on Google Maps; we’re talking never going below 60mph while driving from Northern Virginia into Montgomery County, or from Fairfax into Arlington or Washington, D.C. We’re talking the stuff of American myth.

I don’t much love cars or car dependency, but when driving is like this, I do love it. There is something almost patriotic and ritualistic about it—liturgical, even. I don’t feel silly for having written this, looking back on long night drives when I was in grad school:

I have rarely felt more “American,” in that gauzy 4th-of-July sense, than when driving down an open, empty highway at night. Trapped, alone in a steel skeleton, seeing the road by the light of the signs as much as by the street lamps, it is almost as if I am performing a ritual.

It has occurred to me over these difficult months that this, essentially, was what driving must have been like for a brief period in the early 20th century; late enough that there were decent paved roads and some car-oriented roadside development, but early enough that gridlock and congestion were not yet drearily familiar. This was a snapshot in time, not a steady state that can or should be implemented or mandated through policy. That has not dissuaded us from trying.

Today, the “open road” may strike many urbanists—and many commuters—as a kind of Detroit marketing myth. Certainly, we put up with a great deal of expense, frustration, and carnage because of the pull of the open road in our national mind. But when you experience that sense of freedom, you never forget it.

What long-term effect, if any, will the pandemic have on driving patterns? It’s possible that daily commuting will decrease, as remote work arrangements become more acceptable to employers. If, somehow, 2021 does not see the end of the crisis, the trend of moving far away from the city and “supercommuting” may increase. The pandemic’s effect on public transit has also been disastrous. WMATA, the agency operating the D.C.-area Metro system, recently proposed deep cuts that leave a “bare-bones service network to sustain essential travel.”

Some of this cuts against more driving, and some of it might suggest more. But barely mentioned in all such speculation is the fact that a whole generation of motorists has now tasted the experience of speeding down an open road, within a major metro area. This impossible, intoxicating dream destroyed cities throughout the 20th century, and we can only hope it will not do so again. Even if the total amount of driving doesn’t snap back to pre-COVID levels, the deep decrease in traffic we’ve seen since March is almost certainly temporary. Congestion and traffic jams will return. These are normal and inevitable. The open road can remain an elusive quasi-mythical piece of the American psyche. It must not become an expectation.

 This New Urbanism series is supported by the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. Follow New Urbs on Twitter for a feed dedicated to TAC’s coverage of cities, urbanism, and place.

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