(Note: if you’re in email and click on the headline of this page—On Driving in Texas—it will link you to a better-looking format.)
I love to drive. Or I did love it. Things have changed out there on the roads since the pandemic and its attendant erosion of social trust. I’m not digging getting behind the wheel so much these days. It feels like I lost my favorite hobby. I wonder how many of you feel this way, too.
For background: my most recent job of seven years required I drive all over Texas all the time. El Paso to Tyler, Galveston to Amarillo, McAllen to Denton. Many Marfa trips. Mostly, due to the visual art focus, I was constantly driving between Houston, San Antonio, Austin, and DFW. Despite traffic, I loved these trips and was addicted to them. I am addicted to being in motion (I rock myself to sleep with my own leg), and I happen to love sitting at the wheel of a 3,000-pound machine barreling down highways at 90 mph. It’s fun. It makes music sound better. I get a lot of thinking done on those kind of trips. If I was home for more then ten days in a row, I would start pacing, and decide there was an exhibition or artist in another city many hours away I needed to see, so I could get back out on the road.
The other night, on social media, I gave a good person bad advice about driving in Texas. Not someone I know personally. Rob Henderson, a psychology scholar currently based in England, tweeted that he’d be visiting Dallas, and was looking for recommendations for stuff to do. I like his brain and his Substack (I had been subscribing to his earlier, non-Substack newsletter as well) and in the fog of some nihilistic late-night twitter lurking, I spotted his general callout for Dallas ideas, and felt compelled to respond. After I listed a couple of restaurants and bars, I typed something I regretted by the next morning: “Drive aggressively, but not after 10 pm on I-75.”
Now, I would like this nice man to survive and live a long and happy life and continue to give us excellent and useful terms like “luxury beliefs.” Once upon a time, in the context of Dallas drivers and roads, my advice would have made some sense. DFW drivers are so impatient with slow and indecisive drivers that they let you know one way or another: tailgating, speeding up and cutting you off, that kind of thing. (Houston drivers can be like this, too. Dallas is worse.) A way to avoid this is to drive confidently, and to know where you’re headed before you set out. And really, I-75 after hours has been a Death Race 2000 gauntlet since I was a teenager. Its expansion into more lanes doesn’t hide the fact of epidemic drunk driving in this region and this state.
Dallas traffic is bad these days. Texas’ population has exploded. There are just so many more cars on the road. When I was in college in the late ‘80s-early ‘90s, playing in bands, the drive from UNT in Denton to Deep Ellum in Dallas, with maximum traffic, was maybe 40 minutes, tops. That sounds absurd now, but it’s true.
A couple of months ago the New York Times ran an article on the increase in road rage incidents across the country, though it named Texas as having seen a particularly notable uptick. The reports involve rage incidents with guns added: people are shooting each other out there. I know they are. “In Austin last year, the police recorded 160 episodes of drivers pointing or firing a gun… ,” etc, etc. Someone can be merrily rolling along I-35, realize they need to cross over a few lanes to exit, and find themselves at the angry end of some other driver’s gun. People have been murdered. It’s not that this never happened here before the pandemic. It’s just that the pandemic (and everything it unleashed) has made it more common.
And police aren’t out there anymore. It’s a free-for-all.
(A note: as usual, the comments section on this Times article is dripping with Texas hate. People ranting about how they would never, ever visit the state; about how when they drive across the country they specifically avoid Texas; yada yada. Yeah, we know how you feel about Texas, Times readers.)
And here I’m telling Rob Henderson to drive aggressively. I take it back. I still think that driving with confidence is a good idea. But I mean: one person’s confidence may be read by another person as a provocation, as insult. The angry driver takes the Glock out of the glovebox, rolls down the window, and fires away, at 70 mph on I-30.
Good old I-30, the highway with no shoulders. I moved from Houston back up to DFW recently, and I’ve been making regular trips back and forth between Dallas and Fort Worth for weeks now, on I-30. Twelve years ago, when I was working full-time at TCU, this was a daily commute for me; I drove somewhat against the rush hour but the traffic still kinda sucked. But I was fine with it.
During that time, a friend of mine, an artist originally from Ohio, took an adjunct job at the university to fill in for a professor who was on sabbatical. This guy had spent the last 10-plus years building his life and career in New York City, driving without even thinking about it all over Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. He struck me as absolutely fearless, a bastion of testosterone and rust-belt automotive compulsion and aggression. He rented a place in Dallas and made the same commute I did: I-30, against traffic. He hated it. It terrified him. He thought Texas drivers were insane. Just total kamikaze psychology out there. It made him loathe being in North Texas. He couldn’t wait for his contract to be over so he could go back to driving in Brooklyn and Queens. I was always kind of puzzled by this. I-30 didn’t seem all that bad to me.
But now, 12 years later, when I take I-30, I get what he meant. Texas really does have an unyielding libertarian bent (I'll stick with that); with it, Texas drivers, I think, do engage in death-cult thinking. I do, now. I still listen to Pet Sounds at full blast, I still speed. And yet, I never assume I’m going to make it home alive. Or uninjured. I’m way more alert and defensive.
At this point, what it feels like: a wreck or incident is not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when. To drive here is Russian roulette. I love my car. (I like to say it was built by Fuji Heavy Industries. It sounds a bit tough.) I can’t afford to replace it. And my medical insurance blows. This is all just one long way of saying to you all, please:
Be careful out there.
There is so much anger and impatient lack of care for others on the Texas highways. The two foot tailgating at a 80 miles an hour is the most selfish form of macho narcissism. A pile up of death and destruction one millisecond away, all because you can’t keep a bit of distance or merely go around. There is something imbedded in this behavior—something about our ever eroding sense of responsibility to each other. The American individualism as a pathology. The road warrior rage is just another deadly expression.
oh wow I have a lot of thoughts on TX roads and also NYC roads...having grown up in TX and being allowed to drive (with parental oversight) at age 14, I've seen the speed limit go up to 65-75 and even up to 85 on roads in the middle of nowhere...all I hear is the TXDPS driving course I took in high school to get my license "add 1000ft of stopping distance for every 10 mph over the speed limit"...I drive often btwn ATX and HTX and I get off of 71 asap at La Grange and take a nice lil jaunt of back roads through cute towns and past Round Top...and I arrive safely and not traumatized...and when I drive in HTX, I take local streets and bc I grew up there, I know plenty of back roads...you could not pay me enough to take 59/69 or 610...and I-10, which I grew up off of, I'll take the feeder the entire way or head to Memorial Drive to inside the Loop...am I a little insane?...yeah maybe, but I see lovely homes and yard veg and places I grew up near and can view them at a leisurely pace...and arrive at my destination feeling calm...contrast that with my 25 years of NYC, where I drove a personal car or rented cars for at least 2/3 of that time...driving up 6th Ave during midday doesn't even phase me...the Westside Highway is a breeze and I'll cross any and all bridges with no concern, except for the increasing prices...I don't love JFK, but I also know back entry tricks...fuck LGA...sure flipping ppl off is common and I will admit to doing it more often than I should, but if I do it, it becomes a flip off war at most...no one whips out a gun and aims it at me...I live mostly FT in ATX now and I avoid the highways almost always...I also like to see pretty homes and yards and to arrive at my destination calmly, but I do fear for my 83 year old father...he still drives and he is fine, but he does still stick to the low end of the speed limit on Mopac and tells me every day of guys in huge trucks riding his bumper in the center or far right lane...it used to be understood that you'd be fine not driving fast, as long as you stayed out of the far left lane...now it's become if you are anywhere near obeying traffic laws and someone is pressed to get to wherever (is there a pregnant woman who is in labor with a flaming baby in the car or what?) you are in their way and the aggressive tailgating and swerving is just how to let you know...I don't know, I have nothing helpful to add except yep TX roads are insane, I learned the term "rolling coal" from drivers here and I choose to drive respectfully, but likely OFF the highways...