On sidewalks, cities, corruption and laterality

 

 

1. I drove in Ireland on the right side – instead of the American left – this summer. I drove down country roads that are so narrow that one is always confronting the situation of who concedes, the driver coming towards you or you yourself? It all depends on if there is a space carved out to let the other driver pass. Or vice versa.

 

When my brother drove, and I was in the passanger seat watching the hedges rush past us, like some nightmare of coming accident mixed in with a roller coaster thrill.

 

I read the Bureau while I was in Ireland, Eoin McNamee. The book is about a band of smugglers and crooks operating on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. The book contains a lot of driving, obviously, often on dark narrow roads. Having seen with my own peepers the bright narrow roads of Sligo county, I had a lot more respect for the fictitious thugs. McNamee has learned to transpose Delillo dread (from the early period, Running Dog, the Names, etc.) to the farms, gambling shops, and gasoline trucks of Ulster. It is hard to do dread for too long. McNamee has mastered the half-finished joke, the camera shot flyby, and I do like it.

 

2. Paris sidewalks

 

The French philosophes made a cult out of all things English, from Newton (whose science was taught to Voltaire by his lover, the Marquise du Châtelet), Locke, the school of psychology founded by Hartley, and the threefold division of powers as envisioned by Montesquieu. So it is not surprising that D’alembert and Diderot’s Encyclopedie is full of Anglophilia, even in the farther corners. For instance, in the entry entitled Trottoir, or sidewalk (which may have been added when the Encyclopedie was re-edited in 1825), we read this: “The city of London has been the one that most commodiously instituted the use of sidewalks. It owes this advantage to the almost entire reconstruction of the old part of the city that was consumed in the great fire of 1666. All the streets were retraced on a vast plan, all aligned and cut at right angles.”

This of course is a fantasy, a fanta-fact, but it floated before these dreamers who longed to be the Great Fire themselves, purging the old and crooked from the City.

In the meantime, in 1787, the administration of Paris, which was at that time headed up by Baron de Breteuil (the unfortunate who was named prime minister of France by Louis XVI a week before the storming of the Bastille), sent a letter discussing a new street template. In 1783, the administration of Paris had ruled that all streets should be 30 feet wide; but this created dissatisfaction. In new proposal before the city administration was to make all new streets 36 feet wide, with 6 feet on either side being reserved for sidewalks. That would make the vehicular area 24 feet wide. At no point in the discussion that is reproduced in L’etat de Paris en 1789 is there a discussion of what these widths referred to: the width of the standard carriage? The width of two people standing side by side on the sidewalk? This is probably related to the fact that standardization came in after the 18th century, with the rise of factories – at which point the street scheme of centuries was already in place.

The effect of these obscure discussions are with us today. I can walk down Rue Charlot, which is next to our apartment, and see exactly what the Baron de Breteuil was talking about – streets with a with of 36 feet, with two sidewalks taking up twelve of those feet. Of course, the new street provision was amended, ignored, or forgotten in the next hundred years. In all the industrialized countries, the advent of the automobile brought a new and more dangerous element into the mix of pedestrians and riders. But at no point, to my knowledge, did this lead to experiments about what would be the safest mix – how much for instance per lane would lead to minimizing accidents? How about standardizing exits and pass-throughs? And what size is optimum for pedestrian traffic flow on sidewalks?
In Paris, at least, sidewalks are plentiful (much more so than in Los Angeles, for instance), but they are crowded, bumpy, and imperfectly protected from intrusion by motorcyclists and others. The sidewalks are a part of contemporary life that is sort of hidden – while any Paris mook will know about Haussman, that famous cityscape arranger, it is the rarer urbanite who knows about the father of the Parisian sidewalk, le Comte de Chabrol, who was appointed by Napoleon as the administrator of Paris and began wracking up the “dallage” – pouring sidewalks – as part of his remit. George Sand, latter, accused him of corruption for favoring rock from Volvic – quarried, that is, from his own home territory. Pierre Estienne, in a history of Volvic, sums it up as follows:

Thus we understand the program of Chabrol-Volvic, prefect of the Seine from 1812 to 1830, for discovering other outputs for the stone – in this case, a Parisian clientel: it needed his influence, his power, to impose a stone which had neither the robustness nor the clear and war colors of Paris’s subsoil limestone. “it would have been more economic to pave paris with five france lengths of stone than bringing in the Volvic volcanic stone,” notes a skeptical contemporary. What to make of this sad stone which possesses a darkness that accentuates with age, which decays quickly with use, and should not form paving, much less sidewalks? Chabrol required a rare stubbornness in order to have his friends and most likely associates, the Brosson who were in Pont-du-Chateu, bring in the Volvic stone, cut it, deposit it on ships in the Allier that was almost unnavigable, and finally to have it carried on the canal de Briare up to Paris, and with the price of the rejects that one can only imagine, fill orders. In fact, up to 1830, F. Brusson had obtained the monopoly for supplying lava stone for the sidewalks of the capital, thanks to Chabrol’s protectrion; he even had a permanent sales office on the banks of the Saint-Martin canal.”

A city, as Balzac knew, is not just branded with corruption – corruption often literally drives the creation of the street and the sidewalk. Which in turn has unexpected consequences for the pace of the city, and its politics.

 

3. I got curious, like, about this matter of left handed driving versus right handed driving. A list of the countries that embrace the LHD traffic flow – that is, those where the driver’s side is on the right – is provided by a dry as dust tome by a certain Nicolae Sfetcu – has a rundown. The fact that the Continent, in general, and the Americas are almost all RHD, while the UK, Ireland, and many of the former colonies are LHD is a curious testimony to colonialist laterality. A rather charming election was held in Sweden, which was at the time LHD, to decide on which side of the street to drive on. Overwhelmingly, Swedish drivers selected the pattern they were familiar with – LHD. The Swedish parliament went over the head of the popular will and on 5 a.m. Sunday, September 3, 1967, all traffic had to switch to the right hand side of the street. The NYT noted the change:

 

“Just before the change-over, severely reduced speed limits will be placed into effect, and all but emergency vehicles will be banned for four hours before and one hour after the change-over.”

 

In Sweden it was called H day – for Hoegertraffik, or right handed driving.

 

Chris McManus, in that wonderbook, Right Hand, Left Hand (which will, some day, rank up there with the Anatomy of Melancholy), took up the lateral driving norm and shows that the stories accruing to why one side or the other is preferred rely on various myths. In actuality, up  until the eighteenth century, in most areas of Europe driving was done on whatever side the driver happened to prefer. The code of the road caught the administrative eye only as road traffic started to become dense – in synchronicity with the industrialization of travel brought about by railroads.

 

To show how second nature feels like first nature, McManus quotes a bit from Lolita, where Humbert Humbert, after murdering Clare Quilty, writes: “So I crossed to the left hand side of the highway and checked the feeling. The feeling was good … nothing could be nearer to the elimination of basic physical laws like driving on the wrong side of the road.”

 

The word wrong jumps out at me. Wrong as in error, wrong as in sin. The wires cross in “wrong”, the traffic goes haywire. McManus provides a helpful map of the countries mandating LHD, and a study of how Canada, a RHD country, was actually heterogenous at one time. British Columbia and the Maritime provinces were LHD countries until they were administratively steered right. There is, indeed, something about that administrative fiat that feels like even physical law is under the rule of the state.  In fact, Hitler’s government, after taking over Austria in the Anschluss, ordered Austrians to drive to the right – reversing their previous left handed norm.

 

McManus does not show the roots of the driving preference, but he does suggest that laterality is a bordercrossing thing – if neighboring countries are driving to the left, then there is a high likelihood that your country will drive to the left. We are all immigrants and so are the directions we drive in. The wrong side is the side the horde does not choose.