Gwen Can't Drive

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Hey, everyone, this is Alex Goldman, host of HyperFixed.

If you know my previous show, Reply All, welcome back.

I am very excited to be making stuff again.

And if you don't, I'm happy to have you.

So these two episodes that are coming out right now, they are pilots.

After these come out, we're going to spend a couple months with our heads down, and then the show is going to go into full production in November with a new episode every other week and bonus stuff on the off weeks.

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Okay, enjoy the show.

Hi, I'm Alex Goldman.

This is HyperFixed.

On this show, listeners write in with their problems, big and small, and I solve them.

Or at least I try.

And if I don't, I at least give a good reason why I can't.

Today's episode, Gwen Can't Drive.

So I'm originally from the Midwest, but at this point I've spent over half my life in the New York area.

And during that period of time, I've come across this thing that back home felt utterly foreign to me.

The non-driver.

People who have lived so long in cramped population centers that they never felt like they needed to learn how to drive until it was too late.

I feel like I am unfortunately like too old such that I now feel the full extent of it.

Whereas I imagine if you learn how to drive when you're 16, you're still like maybe a little bit too dumb as a human being to really understand the full extent of the fear.

This is Gwen.

I spoke to her over Zoom in July.

She's 30 years old and she doesn't know how to drive.

I do

know how to drive.

Legally, I have a license.

That sounded very qualified.

I think it's more that I haven't driven without like supervision or a friendly presence in the passenger seat for like more than maybe like five times in my whole life.

Gwen has lived pretty much her entire life in the city.

She was born and raised in Brooklyn with a brief detour in San Francisco.

And in both of those cities, public transit was good enough that she never felt a need to practice.

But lately, she's found herself wanting to explore the world outside of the city.

Except, in order to get out of the city, you have to drive in the city.

And that's the problem.

In recent trips of me driving with friends, I've literally just like started crying, and like, not in any way where like anyone needs to attend to it, but I'm just like, oh, the fear has overtaken me.

I'm just like stoic, silent tears running down my face as I am navigating this highway.

My god,

yeah, Gwen is terrified of driving in New York City.

And if you think that's just like a Gwen problem, it's probably because you've never tried to do it.

Driving in New York City is bonkers.

The streets are narrow, everyone double parks, everyone speeds, there are delivery guys on electric bikes everywhere.

And for Gwen, it's just too overwhelming.

I feel like every time I drive in New York, I always end up in a situation where there's like a bus that's about to turn, there are three double-parked cars, and I'm like, what is the judgment call here?

And I just am afraid to move.

Gwen is, literally and metaphorically, afraid to move forward.

But she wants to, and she has a very specific goal in mind.

There's this one spa in New Jersey that I like to go to.

And for past years, I've had to have my parents drive me there and drive me home.

And I decided last year that I was like, I want this year to be the year that I drive myself to the New Jersey spa.

So that has kind of been my goal for this year.

When's your birthday?

December 23rd.

December 23rd is four months from this recording.

That's not a lot of time to overcome a lifelong fear of driving.

Fortunately for Gwen, she got in touch with me, the guy who started a podcast to solve other people's problems.

So now I'm going to do that, I guess.

So

not only have I driven in the city,

I used to be a mover in the city.

So I've driven moving trucks in the city.

I parallel parked moving trucks in the city, in Manhattan, in Brooklyn, in all five boroughs, and Roosevelt Island.

How would you feel about me being your passenger and teaching you how to drive?

I'm down.

Yeah.

As I told Gwen, I used to be a mover in the city.

I drove a box truck for like two or three years, and that experience definitely made me more comfortable driving here.

But even with that comfort, I am well aware of how scary it is to drive in the city.

I mean, I consider myself a pretty confident driver, but I still managed to clip a city bus driving a box truck one time.

I've also been a victim of the dangerous driving in New York City.

In May 2011, 13 years ago, I was riding my bike home in Manhattan when I was doored by a parked car.

I bounced off the door, I fell into the street, and an oncoming yellow taxi ran over my leg.

Shock and my body's natural need to heal have caused me to forget most of the accident itself and the ensuing hours, but I've heard others retell it.

I've heard that I screamed in agony for about an hour in the ER, with a shard of my tibia protruding from my leg until a trio of internists put me under with a drug called propofol, which is the same drug that killed Michael Jackson.

I've heard that they then pulled as hard as they could on my crushed ankle in an attempt to set the bones, and even sedated, I sat up and tried to fight them off.

I've heard that I cried and cried and continually pressed the button to administer myself morphine, repeating, it's not enough.

It's not enough.

And did you know that if you get too much morphine, you throw up?

Well, I know because that's what happened to me.

What I do remember very clearly are the ensuing months.

Multiple surgeries, ambulating first with a walker and then crutches, then with a boot.

I remember physical therapy and watching my once frequently used bike collect dust in my garage.

And I'm reminded, on days of high-pressure weather, of the porous bones in my leg contracting around the big metal rod inside it.

Which is why, when I started working on the story, I started wondering to myself, like, how did we get to this point where driving is so bad that someone like Gwen can't make it out of the city alone without sobbing?

Why is New York City driving such a uniquely terrible experience?

I'll start by saying that I'm not sure it makes sense to ask why it's hard to to drive in some places and harder in some places than others.

We make places and those places reflect decisions.

This is Peter Norton.

He's a professor at the University of Virginia in the Department of Engineering and Society, and he has written a lot about the history of cars in the U.S., entire books, in fact.

And what he told me is that the decisions that made New York such a uniquely awful place to drive all took place in a very short period of time.

About 20 years between 1910 and 1930 or so.

So imagine stepping back in time to pre-car New York City.

It could not be more different.

There's no traffic laws.

Seven-year-olds can just run to the corner store and buy a stick of butter.

The streets belong to the people.

And then in the 1910s, cars start showing up and nobody knows how to deal with them.

It would be a little bit like if those electric vehicles in airport terminals were to suddenly accelerate to 30 miles an hour, you would have some serious injuries going on.

And that's the kind of dangerous mix that was typical of New York City streets circa 1920.

There are accidents and there are a lot of deaths.

And suddenly, the streets are no longer this perfect pedestrian paradise.

And the response was predictable.

It was, you know, if a person got injured or killed, given the fact that the street was for everybody, the blame went to the driver.

The pedestrians at the time are like, we got to do something about this.

I don't feel safe going into the street anymore.

I certainly don't feel safe sending my kid to the store anymore.

We need to fix this.

And out of this moment, you see a ton of wild proposals emerging.

Some folks think that parking should be banned from whole sections of Manhattan to discourage people from driving there.

And other folks are like, that's a great idea.

Also, we should equip them with some kind of speed governing device that won't allow them to to go above 25 miles an hour.

And that particular proposal terrified people who wanted to sell more cars.

All of this feverish support for the anti-car proposals is actually what starts turning the tide in the other direction.

Because according to Peter, the proposals also mobilized automobile interest groups to fight back.

And it's in that fighting back that we get the effort to redefine the street as a place for driving and not for walking.

When I was in elementary school, I was told a story of how cars came to dominate America.

The broad strokes of it are that cars represent freedom.

And freedom, or at least the idea of it, is something that we Americans are obsessed with.

So when consumer cars were introduced to the marketplace, Americans immediately fell in love and yielded the streets because, well, I mean, that's just what you do when you're in love.

This story that I was taught as a kid, it's bullshit.

What really happened is that once the pedestrians started to organize to save their streets, special interest groups realized they needed to stage a counterattack.

And they said, we have to shift the blame to the pedestrian.

We have to shift the blame to parents and their children.

How will we ever do that?

And I have their documents.

And in their documents, they came up with a plan.

That plan was to offer a free news service.

The National Automobile Chamber of Commerce decided to spin up its own news service that would write articles about how safe cars were and how pedestrians needed to get out of the damn way.

And then they would give those articles to newspapers to publish for free.

Even back then, newspapers loved free content.

So they would just publish these articles as fact.

They blamed pedestrians, they blamed children, they also got the word jaywalking into circulation.

All of a sudden, all these newspapers are talking about jaywalkers, a term that was almost completely unknown in 1920.

But once this free news service comes out in 1924, not only are jaywalkers everywhere, they're the cause of all these automotive deaths you keep hearing about.

That's so insidious.

It's very insidious.

It's, of course, the kind of technique that's used all the time now as well.

This was a 1920s version of the social media campaign in which a well-organized campaign can really change people's minds.

From there, they organized traffic safety campaigns in public schools, which were all about teaching kids to protect themselves from cars by staying out of the street.

And the minute they succeeded at this, they started lobbying for higher speed limits.

So it was not like, you know, this was ultimately an effort to protect kids.

This was really an effort to get the kids out of the way of the drivers.

The anti-car lobby tried to fight back, countering Jay Walker with the term J-Driver.

But as you already know, that didn't catch on.

But that didn't stop AAA from holding a contest to come up with its own alternative anti-driver epithet.

The winning term was flipper boob.

Wait, what was it?

I'm sorry.

The winning term was fliver boob.

Fliver boob.

F-L-I-V-V-E-R-B-O-O-B.

Fliver boob.

So this was their version of J-Driver,

and it was an attempt for AAA to signal to their members, don't drive like a moron or a fliver boob, but the word never took off.

According to Peter, by the end of the 30s, the automobile had won the war for the street.

During that decade, J-Walking Laws popped up all over the country, monopolizing the street for the automobile.

From the 50s onward, the U.S.

spent over $100 billion constructing the interstate highway system.

We completely conceded the roads to cars.

Except the pedestrians didn't go anywhere, at least not in New York City.

They just had significantly less real estate to walk around.

I asked Peter if there was any real movement to take back the streets from cars.

And while he wasn't optimistic, he said, you know, anything's possible if the right person's saying it.

Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, was 1962.

And it really looked like if you had tracked the trajectories in the 50s, that America was going to poison the whole continent with herbicides and pesticides and DDT.

But her book was so persuasive.

that within a decade, DDT was banned within the U.S.

Now, that, I think, is some reassurance because it means that the right messenger, the right messengers, plural,

can help mobilize audiences to combine, to group together and say, no, we don't want this.

We don't want to try this.

We've seen your ideas.

Until that person comes along, we need to play by the car's rules.

And just as Gwen needs to learn how to drive comfortably, I need to learn how to be a good driving teacher.

After the break, I try to learn how to be a good driving teacher.

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Welcome back to the show.

So, we're trying to teach Gwen how to be more confident on the road.

And while I am insane enough to drive in New York City, I'm not so insane that I think I know everything there is to know about driving here.

So, I went to find a professional.

My name is Alec Slacky, and I'm Managing Director of Public and Government Affairs for AAA Northeast.

This is Alex Slatkey.

That's Alec, not Alex.

So, for the purposes of comprehensibility, we'll just call him Slacky.

We reached out to AAA not because they came up with the term flipper boob, but because they have programs specifically designed to help adult drivers.

Drivers like Gwen, people who can technically drive, but are not very comfortable with it.

Slackkey's job these days is primarily PR and outreach, but he used to be a driving instructor.

And more importantly, he grew up in Long Island.

So he's been driving in New York City for a good part of his life.

But more important than that is that he grew up in a family that just loved the road.

It's funny, before I worked at AAA, AAA,

it wasn't me, but it was my brother.

Where I think, I don't know if it was for his birthday or for Hanukkah one year.

My parents just went to AAA and they got him maps.

We love maps in our family.

We just looked at the maps and

enjoy looking at maps and enjoy figuring out routes.

There's just something about a physical map that is fun to look at.

So I asked Slacky, okay,

I need to make sure Gwen is driving safely in the city.

What does she need to do?

And he told me that the best way for Gwen to actually be safe is to emulate maybe my least favorite drivers in the world.

We hear that someone drives like a grandma.

They're going actually the speed limit in the right lane, you know, driving slow.

It's supposed to be an epithet, but it's actually a compliment.

You know, seniors are the...

safest drivers pretty much.

As someone who's ridden in the passenger seat of my 82-year-old mom's car while she tried to light a cigarette and roll down the window and tell a story, this just sounded way off to me.

My experience of older drivers is that they're like dropping a massive boulder in a stream.

They just disrupt the current of traffic.

But Slatkey sees it differently.

A lot of seniors are regulating their driving.

So if they don't like driving at night, they're not driving at night.

If they know they don't like to make unprotected left turns, they don't make unprotected left turns.

They go somewhere where there's a left arrow or they make three rights.

So we actually see seniors are engaging in the lowest levels of risky driving behaviors and they're regulating the way that they drive.

Don't be afraid to be the grandma on the road.

So I asked him what it meant to drive like a grandma, aside from fumbling with a pack of American spirits and trying to share an anecdote about the time she met Marcel Marceau.

And what he described sounded like all the other stuff my mom does when she drives that makes me crazy.

You remember how I said older drivers feel like boulders disrupting a current?

Slacky told me that in order to drive safely, you got to get comfortable being the boulder.

The most important thing is to break down driving into its component parts.

And ultimately, when you're driving, you're controlling two things.

You're controlling the speed and you're controlling the space.

or the direction that you're going.

In New York City, it's 25 miles an hour, pretty much.

It might be lower on certain streets.

On the highways, obviously, it's higher.

It's 50 miles an hour.

Go the speed limit.

And then if you're doing that, that takes away the question of, oh, how fast should I be going?

And then try to leave as much space as you can.

I recognize this is New York City.

That

is a very aspirational statement.

It's not reflecting reality, but let people go around you.

And then he said something that reminded me of Gwen.

The fact that someone's expressing some trepidation about driving is actually a good thing.

The people that I don't want on the road are the people who think they're invincible and who have not a care in the world and drive like they're, you know, the only person on the road.

Those are the people that are causing so much of the destruction and carnage on the roads.

It turns out that maybe getting completely comfortable driving shouldn't be the goal.

According to Slacky, being a little nervous is like a driving superpower.

I spent that evening after talking to him charting a course through Brooklyn that would be easy for Gwen to drive, an activity that Slacky had suggested.

I spent hours on Google Maps, zooming in on intersections and on-ramps, looking at stoplight distribution, all in an attempt to make this easier for Gwen.

But as I did this, Slacky's comments about a healthy fear of driving got me thinking about my own driving habits.

Remember that accident I had?

It definitely made me a more nervous driver, but I think it made me a more attentive driver.

I notice things that other people might completely ignore, and that's all based on fear and anxiety.

If Gwen can channel her own fear in the same way, I think she could actually end up being pretty good at it.

Hello!

Nice to meet you.

I met Gwen for the first time in real life on a balmy August day in Brooklyn.

I was wearing all my recording gear, and Gwen was wearing a very nervous expression on her face.

So, I uh started with some small talk, you know, to break the ice.

Um, how was your morning?

Uh, pretty good.

I mean, it's kind of just started, so

what have you done to prepare yourself so far?

Uh,

for this, nothing other than eat breakfast.

I don't think there's much prep to be had here.

Nailed it.

The first time we spoke, Gwen told me she was nervous that all the other drivers on the road knew things that she didn't.

Like they had some secret menu of driving rules, and that every time she made a decision that violated one of those rules, the other drivers would get mad at her.

I wanted her to know that I'd spoken to a professional and he'd given me a list of tips for her.

And that the first one was, it's okay to drive like a grandma.

The first thing is like, you can go slow.

Like, there's nothing saying you can't go the speed limit.

Everybody's going faster.

I rattled off everything I could remember, and then I got worried I was forgetting things.

And then I couldn't find my list.

And like, hold on, I've got a list here.

I love that.

I love the being able to go slow part because I do go slow, and then I'm so sad for everyone behind me where I'm like, I'm so sorry, you can't get to where you're going.

Yeah, but they can just go around you, and that's fine.

Let's see.

Pep talk complete.

It's time to drive.

So how you feeling?

You ready to go?

Let's go.

Let's do it.

Okay.

We pulled away from the curb slowly and made our way through her neighborhood.

And she did all the things you're supposed to do.

She stopped at stop signs, she checked her mirrors.

She seemed totally fine.

Not at all like the fighting back tears ball of stoic anxiety that she described in our first meeting.

So I was like, okay, let's get on the highway.

So you're gonna merge onto the highway.

I'm gonna try and match their speed.

Uh, okay.

Do I speed up while

on the on-ramp?

Gwen signals, she merges, she starts cruising, and almost immediately we hit traffic.

The Bell Parkway was jammed.

Nobody was moving faster than like 25 or 30 miles an hour.

And for anyone else, including me, your adorable problem goblin, this would have been a hellish driving experience.

But for Gwen, this is highway heaven.

Man, if this is the speed of the highway, I'm fine, you know?

This was not the highway education I wanted to give Gwen.

I did want her to know that it was okay to drive like a grandma, to be slow and careful and deliberate, but I couldn't do that because everyone else was being forced to drive exactly like her.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on which seat you were in, things were about to change.

I've got really bad news for you.

No, is it gonna clear up?

It will clear up.

It's not gonna be like this the whole time.

Eventually, it does clear up, and Gwen starts to get a real introduction to the feel of the highway.

How's being on the highway feel?

I think it's always such a switch from kind of the slow speeds to the fast speeds and then the same when you get off the highway and then you're like, oh, slow down, slow down again.

I think it's okay.

I do think I'm mildly zoned out in that focused way where I'm like, cool, cool, cool.

I am

focused real hard.

On our way through Staten Island, I start to get glimpses of the anxious behaviors that Gwen told me about on our first call.

She's fixated on the idea of doing things the right way.

And she starts asking me questions I've never really even considered before.

When you hear something like 1,000 feet, does that mean anything meaningfully to you?

Like, when I'm turning, I'm like, am I turning too close?

Like, I don't know where I need to be in order to be visible.

Was it okay that I just took the left turn here?

Like, honestly, she's doing pretty well though.

And she's doing very politely, too.

Every time she emerges, she waves to say thank you to the car behind her.

And I noticed we were 30 minutes from Sojo, Gwen's birthday destination.

So I suggested we just go all the way.

Alright.

So according to this, we are 30 minutes from Sojo.

Do you just want to go all the way to Sojo?

You know what?

I mean, I'm down to go if you are.

Sure.

I mean, I don't...

I'm not gonna...

I'm not gonna go spa or anything.

No, absolutely.

We'll just go there.

We'll look at the outside, give it a fond hello, and

wave.

It was honestly pretty uneventful.

And Gwen seemed very happy about that.

And that's why, after we got to Sojo, I decided to take the training wheels off.

The whole time we'd been driving, I'd been navigating for her.

But Gwen's trying to learn how to drive by herself.

So, on the way back home, at her request, I put her in charge of navigating her own journey.

And immediately, she starts talking to herself.

Opening!

Let's go, let's go!

Okay, okay, okay.

Dead end, let's go.

Maybe I'll do a right turn.

I'll do a right turn when I put the light's off.

Okay.

Oh, sorry.

You're good.

Okay.

You're good.

Cool.

To be totally fair to Gwen, this is still not a normal drive.

She is still driving a stranger's car while he's sitting next to her holding a microphone in her face.

Was that turn illegal in some way, actually, though?

Like the turn that you just made?

Yeah.

Yes.

Oh, wait, why?

Because the other one said no right turns.

There was a sign.

My bad.

My bad.

Oh, I wasn't even aware of the consequences.

That's what I feel like is happening all the time while I'm driving, is that like I'm not even aware how close to danger I am as I do it.

I have to say, as mean as this might sound, it's very entertaining to watch you figure this out in real time.

Which part?

The navigation part.

Gwen's silence, after I said that, was just long enough to make me wonder if I shouldn't have.

Is it that I'm making odd choices or that?

Just like watching you go like, oh, was I supposed to, oh, I missed it.

Oh.

Like, oh no, my bad.

In spite of all her anxiety and self-doubt, by the end of the trip, Gwen was making driving decisions on her own, on the fly, that felt right for her.

And that to me feels like a big accomplishment.

I noticed you veering toward the middle lane.

As in like a place to stay?

Yeah.

Because then I don't have to deal with the merging cars.

Oh.

And I got got a slow buddy in front of me.

When we started this journey, I thought I was going to have to do something to help Gwen, to like force a change in her.

I thought that by talking to people, I would get some kind of key or learn some kind of secret phrase that would make her more comfortable.

But sitting in the passenger seat of my own car, watching Gwen cycle through these moments of fear and accomplishment, followed by a little more fear and then accomplishment again, I realized that wasn't what Gwen needed for me.

Over the course of four hours, what I realized is that she just needed company.

And I, the guy shoving the microphone in her face, was that company.

A safe space to make mistakes and ask questions, even though most of my answers were just sort of like, meh, you figure it out as you go.

And honestly, as a first-time driving instructor, I wasn't sure I was being in any way effective.

But when I dropped Gwen off back in Brooklyn, her excitement was electric.

You're like jumping up and down.

I feel like, you know, it's it's post, you know, after a Zoom call where you are so kind of full of adrenaline from being on that you just

are full of gremlin energy?

Do you ever get that feeling?

Gremlin energy.

Oh yeah, the post-Zoom call gremlin energy.

A little bit.

Yeah, I think that's what the driving, where I'm just like, okay, I just, I just did a drive.

You sound, you sound happy.

Like, you sound proud of yourself.

I think I am proud, but also like a little bit amped up.

Yeah, you got that adrenaline flowing.

I think so.

I called Gwen a couple days after our drive to ask her how she was feeling about the whole thing.

Okay, so you and I on Wednesday, we drove for a long time, like four hours.

Yeah.

I, at the end of it, you had been asking, like, how are you feeling?

And I'm like, I'm feeling great.

Wow, I did a driving.

And then for the rest of the day, I was so zoned out.

Like, I was so not present.

I went out swing dancing and I was talking to people.

And I'm like, wow, I'm just not here for conversation.

And I didn't realize how much driving takes out of you.

But at that moment, I was like, oh, this is, this must have used a lot of like brain cells today.

But I'm curious, like.

How do you feel after that long trip?

And does it change the way that you feel about driving?

There was no like specific switch of like where it became less fearful to suddenly like, ah, I've unlocked the secret it's just like with each layer of experience with each like um just kind of judgment call that was made i'm like okay this is doable this is doable i think it's that i feel ready to handle the stress it's not that the stress has gone down but um

i feel

ready to miss a turn on a road or probably block up a street while I try to parallel park for way too long and have people be mad at me.

Rather than it being like, like, okay, I have enough experience.

Like I could still be an uncooked driver and still drive on the road.

I'm excited for you.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

Thank you.

This has been really great.

Hyperfixed is produced by Emma Cortland and Amore Yates.

It was edited by Jane Marie, Emma Cortland, Amore Yates, and Audrey Martovich.

It is hosted by me, Alex Goldman.

The music is by the Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder, and there were also a couple songs by me.

It was engineered by Merritt Jacob.

Fact-checking by Sona Avakian.

As I said at the top, after these two episodes, we will be back in November.

You can learn more about the show and get access to bonus content at hyperfixedpod.com.

Also, this show cannot exist without your problems to solve, so head on over to hyperfixpod.com and submit your problems, please.

I would love to solve them.

Hyperfixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts.

Discover audio with vision at radiotopia.fm.

Thanks so much for listening.

We'll see you soon.

Radiotopia

from PRX.