The Invisible Obstacle

Pressing the frozen gel pack against my temple, I can feel the 4-pronged throb of a burgeoning headache. I walked into the lobby door of the Department of Transit at exactly 8:04 AM. It was one of those hyper-modern, floor-to-ceiling glass panes that are so clean they effectively cease to exist. That is the problem with modern engineering; we are so obsessed with removing obstacles that we forget why they were put there in the first place.

My job as a traffic pattern analyst is essentially to facilitate this invisibility. I spend my 44-hour work weeks staring at heatmaps, trying to ensure that 1,204 vehicles can pass through a single artery without ever having to tap their brakes. We want life to be like that glass door: seamless, transparent, and utterly devoid of resistance. But the moment you forget the door is there, you break your nose on the reality of it.

The Desert of Perfect Flow

I am currently staring at a monitor that displays 234 different data points from the intersection of 4th and Main. The green lines are flowing beautifully. To my superiors, this is a masterpiece. To me, right now, with a forehead that feels like it has been hit by a $54 sledgehammer, it looks like a desert. There is no life in a perfect flow. We have optimized the ‘third place’ out of existence.

We synchronized the lights so that if you drive exactly 34 miles per hour, you will never see a red bulb for 14 blocks. It is efficient. It is productive. It is also incredibly lonely. I think about the 154 people I saw today while nursing this bruise; not one of them made eye contact. They were all part of the flow, sliding through the glass doors of the city without a sound.

Missing the Delays

I’m not supposed to say this in the meetings. In the 344-page manual we use for urban planning, the word ‘delay’ is treated like a pathogen. But I find myself missing the delays. I remember a time when the 4th Street bridge was under construction for 74 days. People were forced to wait. They sat in their cars, they rolled down windows, they yelled at the construction workers, and occasionally, they actually talked to the person in the lane next to them.

“There was friction. There was a bump in the smooth surface of the day that forced a reaction. Now, we are designing cities for ghosts.”

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If you remove the ‘between,’ you eventually remove the ‘here.’ My colleague, who has worked here for 24 years, thinks I’m losing my mind. He’s probably right. The impact with the glass has left me with a strange, oscillating perspective. I see the 404-error of our social fabric.

We are treating human movement like water in a pipe, but humans aren’t liquid. We are solid, jagged, and awkward. We need things to bump into. We need the metaphorical glass door to be slightly smudged so we know where the boundaries are.

The Beauty of Systemic Failure

I once spent 64 minutes watching a video of a busy intersection in Tokyo where the lights broke. It was chaos, but it was a beautiful, sentient chaos. People were negotiating space. They were using their brains. They were being humans. In my 104-page report on that incident, I had to label it a ‘systemic failure,’ but in my heart, I knew it was the only time that intersection had been truly alive in 14 years.

Sometimes I think about how this applies to more than just asphalt and concrete. We do this with our businesses too. We want everything to be streamlined. We look for tools that can smooth out the bumps of operational management, seeking that same ‘glass door’ invisibility in our professional lives. In the world of commercial finance, for instance, people look for that same seamless integration. They want tools like invoice factoring softwareto handle the complexities of cash flow so they can keep moving forward without hitting those sudden, jarring stops that happen when the bank says no or the invoice stays unpaid for 54 days.

The Toy on the Path

I saw a guy today who was so focused on the ‘flow’ of his phone that he almost walked into the same door I did. He was saved by a 4-year-old child who dropped a toy in his path. The toy was friction. The toy was an obstacle. It forced him to stop, to look down, to look up, and to realize he was about to smash his face into a wall.

I am sitting here at my desk, looking at the 14th cup of coffee I’ve had this week, and I’m realizing that my entire career is dedicated to removing the ‘toys’ from the path. I criticize the system, and then I go right back to adjusting the timing on the 94th Street sensor to shave 4 seconds off the average wait time.

The Human Stitch

Maybe the answer isn’t to make cities worse on purpose. But perhaps we should stop being so terrified of the ‘inefficient.’ We should value the park that doesn’t have a direct path through it. We should value the sidewalk that is too narrow for two people to pass without one of them stepping aside. Those small, 4-second interactions are the stitches that hold the city together.

I remember reading a study about a town in the Netherlands that removed all the traffic signs. The 404 people who lived there were terrified at first… Accidents dropped by 74 percent. Because there were no rules to follow, people had to follow each other. They had to look into the eyes of the driver coming toward them.

The Hallway We Built

I wonder what would happen if I just turned off the system for 4 minutes. Just 4 minutes of darkness on the 44 monitors. My boss would fire me in 24 seconds. He likes the fact that we can track a single car from the suburbs to the parking garage without it ever having to stop for more than 64 seconds.

He thinks he’s building a better world. I think he’s building a hallway. A very long, very clean, very empty hallway. My forehead is starting to turn a dull shade of purple, roughly the color of the ‘heavy congestion’ zones on my maps. It’s poetic, in a way.

The real life is happening in the places where the dots stop moving. It’s happening in the 4-minute wait for a latte. It’s happening in the 14 seconds it takes to hold a door open for someone else. It’s happening in the very things I am paid to eliminate.

Finding the Middle Ground

I’ll drive down the 4th Street corridor, and I’ll hit every green light perfectly. I’ll arrive at my apartment in record time, 14 minutes ahead of schedule. And I’ll sit in my quiet living room, looking at the 4 walls, and I’ll realize that I haven’t spoken to a single soul since I hit that glass door. I’ll be perfectly optimized. And I’ll be perfectly alone.

I’ll take the 64-second delay over the 4-second sprint every single time, if it means I get to see the sun reflecting off someone else’s windshield instead of just a digital icon on a map. We are not data. We are the friction.