Here’s a social phenomenon I find fascinating. We all seem to know the same handful of gestures for car-to-car communication. And when I say “car-to-car communication,” I’m talking about the ways you can get something across to other cars while you’re zooming by each other at 60 mph.
Here are the only things you can communicate in a car that I can think of offhand:
| Gesture | Meaning |
|---|---|
| The friendly one-handed wave | Thank you. |
| The window roll-down | Can you roll down your window so I can ask you something? |
| The bird, the shaken fist, long horn beep | I’m angry and annoyed at you. |
| Turn signals | I’m going to turn or change lanes. |
| The one-handed go-ahead | Go ahead, I’ll let you go first. |
| Quick flash of headlights | (1) Go ahead. (2) There’s a police car ahead. (3) You’ve got your brights on when you shouldn’t. |
| Short beep | Pay attention. |
| Hazard lights on | Use caution, I’m having a problem with my car. |
So what’s so fascinating about these gestures? First off, nobody ever really teaches them to you. I can’t remember anybody ever showing me the gesture to get someone to roll down their window; I simply learned it in context.
Even more interesting is the fact that the official hand gestures that the government does teach you — left hand extended to turn left, left hand up to turn right — are hardly ever used. The few times a year I see somebody stick their hand out the window to make an official hand turn signal, it takes me a few seconds to actually remember which gesture translates to which direction.
But there’s a problem in that certain necessary communications just aren’t a part of the common lexicon of driving. We don’t need to communicate angst at the state of the Dow Jones to other drivers on the highway, but there are certain basic concepts it would be helpful to be able to communicate. How do you indicate to someone that you want to go straight and not turn, for instance? You can’t. (Not easily, at least.) And here are some more simple gestures that I think should be a part of our driving vocabulary:
- Follow me.
- Please move over a lane and let me pass you.
- Stop tailgating me, I’m going to move over and let you pass as soon as I pass this group of cars.
- You seem to be having a mechanical problem with your car.
- You’ve got your brights on and you’re right behind me.
- You’ve been driving with your blinker on for the past 3 miles.
But the most crucial omission from this lexicon is that there’s no way to say you’re sorry. Sometimes you can use the friendly one-handed wave, but unless you do it just right, this gesture can be mistaken for arrogance. I remember once a number of years back I was driving along a highway paying too much attention to the radio, and I almost sideswiped a church van with a dozen people on it that had crept into my blind spot. We both swerved and caused half a dozen cars around us to swerve too. Luckily everything came out okay and nobody was hurt. But in that two-second interval before we moved off to different lanes and parted forever, I couldn’t think of any way to indicate to the occupants of the van that I had made a mistake. They had plenty of ways to communicate their anger with me — honking, shaking fists, yelling — but how could I say I was sorry? I couldn’t. These people reached their destination angry and scared, I’m sure, and there was nothing I could do about it.
They say you can tell a lot about a culture by studying their language. The Eskimos have a gazillion words for snow. There’s a hunter/gatherer tribe in Brazil that only has three words for counting: “one,” “two,” and “many.” So what does it say about driving culture that we have no way of saying we’re sorry? It’s a cycle that only leads in one direction: we have no way of expressing calm and measured politeness on the road, therefore people interpret this as hostility, and therefore people are angrier and more reckless on the road.