‘Everybody Is Out for Himself’

In an effort to gain firsthand knowledge of Los Angeles’ traffic situation, The Times has assigned a reporter to obtain the views of experienced drivers who daily face the blundering herd in our streets with heart in mouth and foot on brake. His stories are to be published as helpful hints rather than solutions for an overwhelming problem.

--Editor’s note,

Los Angeles Times,

Jan. 14, 1946

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Fifty-two years ago, before the era of the endless freeway, a veteran Times reporter named Gene Sherman was assigned to roam the city’s boulevards and back streets in an attempt to answer the most pressing question of the road:

Just how bad were L.A. drivers?

Sherman--an ex-war correspondent who would later become The Times’ first London bureau chief and won a Pulitzer prize for stories about Mexican drug trafficking--hit the road with folks such as taxi drivers, trolley car operators and traffic judges, seeking their blunt insights on the bad habits and idiosyncrasies of Angelenos behind the wheel.

A half-century later, the newspaper dispatched a road-tested Metro reporter to retrace Sherman’s faded tracks to see if there were any new lessons to be learned.

There weren’t.

It’s still a mess out there. We still drive each other crazy.

Part of the charm of this on-the-road insanity lies in the fact that human dynamics have changed so little since 1946, when Los Angeles was beginning to adjust to its returning World War II veterans and boasted a single freeway (the Arroyo Seco Parkway, now the Pasadena Freeway).

Of course, some things have changed. We killed ourselves more often in cars in 1946 than we do now. With half of today’s population, 505 people lost their lives on L.A. city streets in ‘46, compared to only 233 last year.

But don’t ask Christine Susan Carlton to start handing local drivers any safety awards.

Carlton drives a Yellow Cab--a 1992 Ford Crown Victoria with 227,000 miles on its original V-8 engine. Like a gambler, she says, she’s addicted to her work. Every day, she takes that roll of the dice to see where her taxi fares will take her.

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For nine years, the 37-year-old Connecticut native has driven her cab across Los Angeles streets--12 hours every day, 300 miles a shift, 2,000 per week. Before that, she drove a long-distance truck. The long hours and tough miles have given her a no-nonsense view of the motorists around her.

“Believe it or not, people in Los Angeles just don’t know how to drive,” she says. “Do you know how many times I want to cuss them out, to get out of my cab and say, ‘What the heck are you doing?’ ”

Too many motorists drive too fast in the rain, she says. They follow others too closely and often childishly refuse to offer somebody else the right of way. They do distracted, boneheaded things like reading books or maps while driving.

Carlton has seen couples having sex in their cars, women using blow dryers, breast-feeding and putting on makeup--their cosmetics spread across the dashboard. Likewise, she’s seen men changing their clothes, eating pizza, fiddling with pagers, shaving, watching TV, not to mention having their ear glued to a cellular phone.

The result: Wild, herky-jerky, no-look freeway lane changes. Red lights and stop signs totally ignored. Pedestrians grazed at the hip.

“You have to ask, ‘If they’re doing all these things inside their cars, how can they possibly be paying attention?’ ”

Riding along in the front passenger seat with another Yellow Cab driver back in 1946, Gene Sherman got a similar earful from a 12-year cabby named Harold A. Baker:

“The trouble is,” he said, “everybody is out for himself when he’s behind a steering wheel. The first object is to get there in a hurry. And the thing of it is, they aren’t in a hurry at all.

“There’s no courtesy on the road,” Baker continued. “Our company has a slogan, ‘Wave ‘em through and watch ‘em smile.’ Give the other fellow the right of way.

“Well, you do that for a while and you expect people to give you a break, too, occasionally. You get awful tired of waving ‘em through when nobody waves you through. It makes it kind of hard to live up to the slogan.”

Christine Carlton drives by the same courteous company slogan, only to watch as other drivers fail to return the favor and refuse to look in her direction--or even wave thanks.

“The more polite you are today, the more people take advantage of you,” she says. “You give the guy ahead a little space and five cars immediately fill it in. People don’t give each other any breathing room.” On a weekday afternoon, Carlton cruises northbound along La Brea Avenue toward her Hollywood turf. She loves the pace of the place--tourists, window shoppers and sidewalk amblers looking for a lift.

Turning onto Hollywood Boulevard, she eases along with the flow of traffic. No slicing from lane to lane. No tailgating. Carlton follows a simple surface street rule: If you can’t see the rear tires of the car ahead, you’re way too close.

Then a lime-green Bell cabby pulls an illegal U-turn in front of her, jockeying for the first position in a street-side cab stand. Carlton doesn’t get mad. “When people do foolish things that make my teeth grind, I just tip my head back and laugh.”

Carlton watches two women on the sidewalk--she’s wary of pedestrians who take too many chances--cutting between parked cars to make an ill-advised dash across the middle of the street.

These days, even the once-patient bus drivers aren’t so friendly, lurching into intersections before the light has changed. Says Carlton: “They’re as bad as everybody else.”

Wait a minute. Aren’t taxi drivers the worst traffic offenders of them all? Aren’t they Public Enemy No. 1 of the road?

Cheap shot, Carlton insists. Gone, she says, are the days when taxi drivers drove like bats out of highway hell. Nowadays, more than two moving violations means Yellow Cab pulls your license. Her company says it inspects the records of drivers every six months.

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“This Yellow Cab with its big number out front is a moving invitation for complaints,” she says. “People love to get on their car phones and gripe, ‘That cabby’s driving like a maniac.’ So, if you act like a jerk on the road, you’re not gonna be driving a cab for very long.”

She echoes a suggestion that cabby Harold Baker made in 1946:

“Think ahead. Worry about the people in front of you. Let the people behind you worry about you. And give the proper arm signals--hardly anybody does, anymore.”

Carlton also has a few more modern suggestions.

“People just don’t give themselves enough time to get where they’re going. Then they cuss and swear at other drivers because they can’t get there on time. The solution is easy: Leave earlier.”

L.A. drivers are weather-lazy, she says. Unlike their counterparts elsewhere, they too often don’t account for road conditions. “They still can’t get it through their heads that they have to slow down when the road is wet.”

Driving local streets at odd hours, Carlton also has seen the deadly effects that drugs and alcohol have on motorists. She believes that people who earn their livelihood behind the wheel--such as cabbies--should pass a drug test before receiving their license.

She keeps her sense of humor. But when the driving turns really tough, she reaches down to touch the little statue of an angel she keeps just below the dash.

“What can I say?” she says with a smile. “Taxi drivers are a superstitious breed.”