We hit the brakes more than the horn

In the film “The Italian Job,” (recently released on video and DVD and well worth the rental fee), Los Angeles traffic has a starring role. During the second half of the story, the “good” guys hack into Caltrans and manage to manipulate various streetlights to foil the bad guy. Many factual liberties were taken, or at least one hopes were taken, as far as Caltrans goes, but for the most part, cinema Los Angeles in this case bears a remarkable resemblance to verite Los Angeles.

Except in one scene.

The establishing shot for local traffic problems pans over miles and miles of rush-hour freeway. Above a river of metal, the air shimmers with a din of honking. It is a classic shot of gridlock, but it must have been shot in New Jersey.

Because Angelenos don’t honk in gridlock.

In fact, given the amount of time we spend in our cars, we don’t honk much at all. Even as electric storms flooded downtown at rush hour and the MTA strike has doubled commute times, Los Angeles has been the very image of silent suffering. Oh, there are those who will bleat at the car in front of them the moment the stoplight turns green or lean into an automotive fermata should someone cut them off on the freeway. But for the most part, we save our horns for non-traffic-related communications -- to show our support for war protesters or supermarket strikers, to express admiration for an appealing member of the opposite sex, to avoid actually getting out of the car and walking to the front door to pick up our dates/friends/elderly relatives.

Last week, as miles of cars cha-cha-chaed around enormous rain puddles and through stoplights shorted by lightning, Los Angeles was a vision of silent, unrestrained politeness. All we needed was a Chip and Dale soundtrack.

Through the University of California Transportation Center, which is based in Berkeley, many people around the state study different aspects of our relationship with vehicular movement. Although several researchers agreed that L.A. was pretty much a no-honk zone, they had to admit there had been no formal study into the phenomenon. Still, everyone had a theory.

Pat Mokhtarian, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis, has conducted studies that have found, among other things, that people prefer a 12- to 15-minute commute to a 0-minute commute because they need to psychically separate work from home. She has also found that the increase of the average commute time does not mean that most people’s commutes have actually gotten worse “because you have to take into account the growing number of people with extreme commutes.” She thinks it’s a matter of familiarity breeding contentment. “Angelenos are more mellow, more culturally accustomed to congestion,” she says. “The whole atmosphere is, ‘It’s there, get used to it.’ They might compensate in other ways -- customize their vehicle, learn to just zone out.”

Mokhtarian lived in Los Angeles for a few years. When she moved here, she was struck by how quiet the traffic was. “I was surprised at how polite everyone was,” she says. “They seem not to express frustration.”

One of her students, David Ory, thinks it is less a function of politeness than disengagement. “People in L.A. don’t wave either,” he says. “They don’t acknowledge when someone lets you in.”

Ory, who visits Los Angeles every few months from Davis, says drivers there honk even less than those in San Francisco, where honking is considered politically incorrect. “If you wanted to be cynical, which I’m not,” he says, “you could attribute it to Angelenos being more self-absorbed. They’re more into their phone call; they’re too busy to honk.”

In all probability, it is a bit of both -- politeness is, after all, a form of disengagement, social rules that form steady bridges over the often hazardous rivers of human emotions. And for all its air-kissing, tree-hugging, who-loves-ya-baby hype, Los Angeles has a tendency toward social as well as geographic distance. We do not yell at each other on street corners, or tearfully break up with our lovers in crowded restaurants, or hang out of eighth-story apartment windows sharing our thoughts on child rearing with a neighbor below. L.A. waiters are not intentionally and dramatically rude, our cabdrivers rarely give anyone the finger, and, if anything, there are too dang many people insisting you “have a nice day.” Which isn’t to say we don’t have our issues. Most citizens of this city seem neurologically incapable of arriving anywhere on time (inexplicably, the gap between actual time and perceived time stretches as one heads west; it must have something to do with the horizon.) We religiously send out formal invitations for even informal events and then, en masse, refuse to RSVP.

But these are more sins of omission, extensions of our desire to avoid direct contact or conflict.

The only people in L.A. culture encouraged to yell are higher-ups in the entertainment industry and sports fans; the rest of us must content ourselves with e-mail hissy fits and unreturned phone calls.

In such a culture of silence, is it surprising that we do not honk? In Los Angeles, the roadway is both cathedral and war zone. Longtime drivers tend to enter a yogi-like trance when traveling familiar routes -- to disturb them would be sacrilege. And we’ve all heard just enough road rage tales to worry that by honking, we might tip the delicate chemical balance of some locked-and-loaded type who has already had a very bad day.

So we tap gently on our horns when someone is about to make a bad left, or content ourselves with nonobscene hand gestures at the car creeping ahead of us in the left lane. Or, when we’re really mad, we’ll jockey our car next to the offending driver at a stoplight and Stare. Right. At. Him.

Like many gorillas and very small dogs, Angelenos hate that.