Chapter 304: First Gridlock Part 1

Ernest Teucher discovered the next great challenge of the industrial age while traveling at precisely zero miles per hour.

He sat behind the polished wooden steering wheel of his personal Model One in the middle of King’s Avenue.

The two-cylinder engine beneath the hood idled with steady, rhythmic precision: put-put-put-put-put.

A gap opened. Ernest eased the clutch in and moved forward six feet.

He stopped.

He waited forty seconds, shifted forward another four feet, and stopped again.

Ernest leaned slightly over the door and looked down the long, cobblestone avenue.

Ahead of him sat a black Model One.

In front of that was an ornate two-horse brougham carriage.

Ahead of the carriage was another Model One, followed by a heavy brewery delivery wagon, two more Model Ones, an omnibus packed with morning commuters, another Model One, an electric tram grinding slowly through an intersection, and three reckless delivery boys on bicycles who were threading impossible gaps between horses’ flanks and hot radiator grilles.

Further down, an endless line of vehicles was attempting to force its way into the avenue from the eastern commercial quarter.

Ernest checked his rearview mirror.

Behind him stretched an identical, bumper-to-bumper queue of idling motorcars, snorting horses, and impatient drivers.

His fingers tapped against the steering wheel rim.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Beside him in the passenger seat, Eleanor sat with her legs crossed comfortably beneath her wool skirt. She had an open novel resting in her lap, completely engrossed in a story.

Ernest looked at her.

She turned a page with a faint rustle of paper.

Ernest looked back through the windscreen. The brewery wagon ahead had not moved an inch.

He looked back at his wife. "You aren’t bothered by this situation in the slightest?"

"By what situation, dear?" Eleanor asked calmly, not lifting her eyes from the page.

"This." Ernest gestured broadly at the sea of stationary iron and horseflesh. "This mechanical stagnation."

Eleanor glanced over the side of the open tourer, noted the motionless queue, and smiled faintly. "Traffic?"

"Yes! Gridlock!"

She adjusted her bookmark and returned her gaze to the print. "Not particularly, no."

"We haven’t advanced ten yards in five minutes," Ernest said, his voice laced with engineering dismay.

"Which means I have had five uninterrupted minutes of delightful reading," she replied smoothly.

"That is not an efficient utilization of a metropolitan arterial thoroughfare."

"Perhaps not," Eleanor said, turning another page. "But it is an exceptionally efficient utilization of my morning."

Ernest frowned, his fingers drumming a faster rhythm against the wheel.

Just then, a private horse-drawn carriage in the adjacent lane found an opening. The driver snapped his reins, and the two brown mares trotted forward, gaining roughly twenty feet of open roadway while Ernest’s automobile remained thoroughly trapped behind a handcart.

Ernest watched the carriage pull ahead.

He disliked this development immensely. Internal combustion had been conceived to liberate mankind from the physical limitations of animal muscle. Watching horse hooves outpace eight mechanical horsepower felt like an affront to thermodynamics.

The carriage driver glanced down from his high wooden bench.

He spotted Ernest sitting behind the wheel. The man’s eyes flicked to the brass Teucher radiator badge, then back to Ernest’s face.

Recognition struck.

A broad, deeply satisfied smirk spread across the driver’s face. It was not a polite or deferential smile; it was the look of a veteran coachman who had spent two years listening to people brag about the future of motoring, only to watch the father of the industry get thoroughly stuck behind a pile of turnips.

The coachman tipped his hat with exaggerated politeness.

Ernest stared back with a flat, unblinking glare.

Eleanor looked up from her book just in time to catch the exchange. She bit back a laugh. "Ernest, don’t."

"I haven’t done anything."

"Your eyebrows are doing something exceptionally hostile."

"That horse carriage is moving faster than an internal combustion motorcar," Ernest said stiffly.

"Yes, it is."

"That is unacceptable. It defeats the entire philosophical purpose of mechanical road transport."

Eleanor tilted her head, amused. "And what was the purpose, my love?"

Ernest waved his hand toward the hood, the chassis, and the idling engine. "Speed! Precision! The systematic elimination of transit friction!"

"Well," Eleanor observed lightly, looking ahead at the sea of stopped wagons, "it appears your precision has run directly into everyone else’s speed."

She was entirely right, and that made it even harder to swallow.

The kingdom of Helmarte had enthusiastically embraced the motorcar.

And that was precisely where the catastrophe had begun.

Plant Number Two’s standardized production lines were operating at maximum volume. The recent assembly improvements had driven manufacturing waste down and assembly speeds up, stabilizing the standard retail price at 61,500 riels.

That price drop, combined with structured bank financing and the booming trade in certified pre-owned vehicles, had torn the automobile market wide open.

Two years ago, a motorcar had been an eccentric luxury reserved for the high nobility and fabulously wealthy financiers.

Now, it seemed as if every prosperous citizen in the capital owned one.

Senior doctors drove them to hospital rounds. Lawyers drove them to the central courthouse. Merchants used them to survey suburban warehouses. Headmasters, shopkeepers, architects, civil servants, and hotel concierges drove them.

The wealthy still distinguished themselves, of course—their custom-bodied tourers featured imported leather, bevel-edged glass windscreens, and polished nickel lamps.

But the physical street space belonged to the standard black Model One.

Ernest looked across the avenue. From where he sat, he could count five black Model Ones.

No, six.

Seven, if he counted the commercial chassis with the baker’s wooden box mounted behind the cab.

The line jolted forward. Ernest engaged first gear, rolled ahead twenty feet, and hit the brakes again as the red brake lanterns ahead flared.

He let out a heavy, defeated breath.

"You sighed," Eleanor noted.

"I merely exhaled."

"You exhaled with deep ideological resentment."

Ernest looked toward the major four-way intersection ahead.

A lone city constable stood on a raised wooden platform in the exact center of the crossing. The poor officer was sweating profusely under his wool uniform, frantically waving his white-gloved arms and blowing a brass whistle with desperate intensity.

A whistle, Ernest concluded, was a woefully inadequate control mechanism for managing thousands of foot-pounds of mechanical torque.

From the north avenue, a heavy four-horse dray laden with timber surged into the crossing.

From the west, a black Model One attempted to execute a sharp right turn across oncoming traffic.

A young boy on a bicycle darted directly behind the turning motorcar to avoid a puddle.

Seeing the bicycle, an oncoming horse-drawn cab slammed on its carriage brakes, causing the lead mare to rear up in panic.

The constable blew three frantic, piercing blasts on his whistle.

In a modern city, three whistle blasts might carry a specific legal meaning. In Helmarte, every single driver interpreted the noise differently.

The timber wagon driver assumed the whistle meant ’clear the intersection’ and whipped his horses forward.

The motorcar driver panicked, stalled his engine, and came to an abrupt dead stop directly across the horse lane.

The wagon driver yanked his reins hard to the left to avoid crushing the car’s radiator.

The vehicle following the timber wagon did not have horses with eyes. It had iron drum brakes and a distracted driver.

CRUNCH.

The sharp, sickening sound of splintering oak and crushed thin-gauge sheet metal echoed across King’s Avenue.

Eleanor winced, closing her book. "Oh dear."

Ernest had already unlatched his door and stepped down onto the cobblestones. "Stay in the car."

"Ernest, do not involve yourself in a street brawl—"

"I am merely conducting an accident analysis," he said, striding toward the wreckage.

The collision, fortunately, was minor. The trailing Model One had struck the rear overhang of the timber wagon at perhaps eight miles per hour. Its brass headlamp was crushed into yellow shards, the stamped steel fender was crumpled like wet parchment, and the wagon had lost its rear timber gate.

Nobody was bleeding.

That, however, did not prevent six fully grown men from shouting at the top of their lungs in the middle of the street.

"You stopped dead in the middle of the road, you bloody idiot!" the wagon drayman roared, shaking a leather whip.

"The policeman blew his whistle at me!" the motorist shouted back, stepping out to inspect his crushed radiator.

"He blew the whistle to halt cross traffic, not to make you park across two lanes!" a stranded carriage passenger yelled from behind.

"You were traveling far too fast for the wet cobblestones!" a bystander chimed in.

The constable climbed down from his wooden box, his face purple with fury, blowing his whistle until his cheeks puffed out. "Quiet! All of you, stand back! I ordered everyone to halt!"

"Nobody can see your hands past that beer wagon!" the motorist yelled.

Ernest stepped into the circle of debris, his eyes scanning the road surface.

The constable turned, his hand reaching for his nightstick, ready to threaten another unruly civilian. Then his eyes locked onto Ernest’s face.

The anger vanished from the officer’s expression, instantly replaced by sheer, exhausted despair.

"Lord Teucher," the constable groaned softly, taking off his helmet to wipe his forehead.

Ernest looked at the crumpled steel fender, then at the tangled knot of horses, bicycles, and cars blocking all four directions. "Does this happen frequently, Officer?"

The constable stared at him blankly for two seconds, then let out a hollow, bitter laugh.

"Frequently, My Lord?" The man pointed down King’s Avenue. "We had four collisions at this exact junction last week alone."

"Four reported accidents in seven days?" Ernest’s brow furrowed.

"Four that broke axles or killed horses, sir," the constable clarified bluntly. "If you count cracked headlamps, dented wings, and clipped carriage wheels, we average three an afternoon. My men spend more time writing incident reports and calming hysterical horses than catching pickpockets."

Ernest knelt down and picked up a jagged piece of brass lamp casing.

The problem was staring him right in the face.

Helmarte had enthusiastically purchased thousands of motorized machines capable of traveling thirty miles per hour, and it had dropped them directly into a street grid designed in the fourteenth century for walking peasants, ox carts, and hand-drawn wheelbarrows.

When Ernest finally returned to his Model One, he stopped short.

Eleanor was sitting behind the steering wheel.

"What are you doing?" he asked, blinking.

"The lane moved forward twenty yards while you were inspecting scrap metal," Eleanor said calmly, adjusting her leather driving gloves. "I drove."

Ernest looked back down the street. The smug carriage driver from earlier was now fifty feet behind them, thoroughly hemmed in by a coal cart.

A completely irrational surge of triumphant satisfaction warmed Ernest’s chest.

"Well done," he murmured, climbing into the passenger seat.

Eleanor slid back over to the passenger side, handing him the wheel. "What was the conclusion of your forensic inquiry?"

"The existing municipal ordinances are dangerously obsolete," Ernest said, shifting into gear. "Passing laws on registration tags and speed limits means nothing if the physical intersection cannot process the volume."

"So what needs to change?"

Ernest looked through the windscreen at the endless rows of chimneys and storefronts flanking the narrow avenue. "Everything. The roads, the signage, the flow of right-of-way, and the fundamental way a city organizes space."