Manana Comes to the Fast Lane
Now comes Robert Levine with a great mystery about L.A.
You may recall psychologist Levine’s prior foray into urban life. He’s the fellow who concocted the clever experiment a while back showing that people in Los Angeles and New York were less likely to help a stranger in need than people in most other cities.
Actually, that study pretty much figured, especially since it showed that New York ranked even lower than L.A. on the kindness-to-strangers scale. The cosmology we carry around in our heads about who’s mean, who’s meaner, etc., was not thrown off kilter.
Levine’s back now with a new study in his new book, “A Geography of Time.” And he seems determined to rock the cosmology with this one.
Levine is an academic, so he won’t characterize the results, but lemme tell you: They’re shocking in regards to L.A. They seem so wrong that you figure his people had to make a mistake somewhere.
Like, maybe the researcher was hit with sunstroke in L.A.--very common here, after all--and went blank for a few minutes. Or some pages washed away at the beach. Something.
In any case, this study involves the pace of life in urban America. Levine sent researchers to 36 cities to measure the speed at which people went about their business.
“I had learned that people deal with time in vastly different ways, and I was interested to see if we could measure these differences,” Levine says. “It seemed to me the results might say something basic about how we lead our lives.”
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I’ll say. How often has the manana culture of tropical countries been blamed for their lack of economic prowess? And wasn’t the Industrial Revolution built on the discovery that time could be divided into small chunks and workers regimented by the millions to its hurried dictates?
Levine devised four tests for his project. His crews would clock the walking speeds of pedestrians, the working speed of bank clerks, and the voice speed of postal clerks. Finally, they would record the percentage of wristwatch wearers in each city.
As you might expect, New York scored near the top. Its pedestrians steamed down sidewalks at the 11th-highest speed in the country despite the necessity of stepping over fallen comrades and dodging police tape. New York also had the highest percentage of watch wearers.
Boston hit the No. 1 spot overall, also no surprise, with the second-highest walking speed and sixth-fastest bank tellers. Columbus, Ohio, came in fifth and Houston rolled in at the No. 12 spot.
And how fared Los Angeles, the second-largest city in the land, home of the fast deal and generations of fast-talking Sammy Glicks, the creator of fast food and fast cars, a tense urban mega-city built, as one critic said, to move on perpetual fast forward?
Dead last. That’s right. No. 36 out of 36. We not only came in slower than Chicago and Philadelphia, we also lost out to speedster cities like Shreveport, La., and Memphis, Tenn.
The particulars go like this: L.A. measured 24th in walking speed, 35th in talking speed, and 36th in bank speed. The numbers, gruesome beyond belief, suggest that Woody Allen was right after all: We are poaching our brains here in the eternal sunshine.
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Can it be true? I dunno. Levine reports that the talking speed--as measured by asking a question of a postal worker--is so slow here that if the postal worker was reading the 6 o’clock news, he would have taken until 7:25 to report what a Columbus, Ohio, postal worker would have concluded at 7.
Is it possible, I ask Levine, that the L.A. postal worker might have been distracted by, um, gunshots in the background? Were other postal workers desperately dialing 911 while he was trying to explain the difference between certified and insured mail?
Levine denies the presence of gunshots. But that only leads to other possibilities.
For example, this walking speed business. Why measure walking in L.A. when everyone knows that walking is not exactly a practiced art here? Why not measure the 0-60 mph acceleration rate of drivers coming off a freeway entrance signal?
Or how about the number of seconds it takes drivers to honk when someone stops on Ventura Boulevard and tries to curb park on Saturday night?
Or take banking speed. What about the speed it takes an ATM customer in L.A. to crank out a wad of cash at 11 p.m. on a night when the moon is dark?
No, no, and no, says Levine. It won’t wash. The truth is, we are slow, he says, very slow, a tra la la slowpoke town, and we might as well face it.
I still think he’s wrong, of course. And one of these days I’m going to prove it. But right now all this has made me tired. Perhaps manana. . . .
