A Captive Audience: Traffic Radio as Guard and Escape

Journal of Radio & Audio Media

ISSN: 1937-6529 (Print) 1937-6537 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hjrs20

A Captive Audience: Traffic Radio as Guard and Escape Karin Bijsterveld & Marith Dieker To cite this article: Karin Bijsterveld & Marith Dieker (2015) A Captive Audience: Traffic Radio as Guard and Escape, Journal of Radio & Audio Media, 22:1, 20-25, DOI: 10.1080/19376529.2015.1015859 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19376529.2015.1015859

Published online: 15 Apr 2015.

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INVITED ESSAY

A Captive Audience: Traffic Radio as Guard and Escape Karin Bijsterveld and Marith Dieker Radio finds a highly captive audience in the car. Motorists listen to radio for music and generic news, but also prick up their ears for specific traffic reports, despite the recent rise of navigation technologies with real-time traffic information. Traffic radio helps drivers to prepare for or prevent traffic problems. This essay explores the contexts in which traffic radio acquired its dual role as the motorists’ guard and escape, and how it is now seen to contribute to sustainable mobility. In the 2007 BBC television documentary The Secret Life of the Motorway, a radio disk jockey claims to know ‘‘two places where you have a really intimate relation with the listener.’’ The first is the car, ‘‘because there is a captive audience. The second one is : : : in prison!’’ (DVD, 2007). It is a telling joke. To the millions of drivers who are caught in traffic jams each day, the highway recurrently presents itself as a giant prison. They may listen carefully to the radio—the guard that keeps them listening—in search of an escape. Radio offers them a metaphorical escape through sonic distraction: the car is reportedly the most popular place for listening to music (Brodsky, 2002, p. 219), and car radio as well as other in-car audio sets help to enliven the boring aspects of the driver’s life on the road (Bull, 2003). Car radio even offers hope for a physical

Karin Bijsterveld (Ph.D., Maastricht University, 1995) is professor of Science, Technology and Modern Culture at Maastricht University. She is co-editor, with Trevor Pinch, of the Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2012). Her research focuses on issues at the crossroads of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Sound Studies (http://fasos-research.nl/sonic-skills). Marith Dieker (M.Sc., Maastricht University, 2013) is a Ph.D. candidate at Maastricht University. She is currently working on her research project ‘‘Talking You Through: Traffic Information and Car Radio, 1950s– Now.’’ The historical part of this essay has been adapted from Sound and Safe: A History of Listening Behind the Wheel by K. Bijsterveld, E. Cleophas, S. Krebs, and G. Mom (2014), and has been reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. © 2015 Broadcast Education Association DOI: 10.1080/19376529.2015.1015859

Journal of Radio & Audio Media 22(1), 2015, pp. 20–25 ISSN: 1937-6529 print/1937-6537 online

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escape: the traffic information broadcast through radio may provide information on alternative routes. In today’s ideas about strategies for sustainable mobility, therefore, radio’s captive audience is approached without much irony. The Horizon 2020 draft titled ‘‘Mobility for Growth’’ cites the European Union’s ambition to achieve a ‘‘resourceefficient, climate- and environmentally-friendly, safe and seamless’’ transport system (2013, p. 5). State-of-the-art information, communication, and navigation technologies should provide real-time, integrated, and multimodal travel information that fosters both an efficient use of the highway and an efficient choice of transport alternatives beyond the car. Traffic radio is one of these technologies: another EU document, from 2007, identifies the FM Traffic Message Channel, which operates through the Radio Data System (RDS), as ‘‘the most successful traffic information service’’ (European Commission, 2007). In contrast to what one might expect, the increasing use of dynamic message information and in-car navigation technologies has not made radio traffic reporting systems obsolete. Radio, so the Dutch National Databank for Road Traffic Information claims for The Netherlands, ‘‘is still the most important source of traffic information’’ (NDW, 2014; see also Tseng, Knockaert, & Verhoef, 2013, p. 199). Currently, spoken radio traffic reports are common every 20 to 30 minutes on several European radio stations, up to every 10 minutes on numerous all-news stations in United States metropolitan areas.1 When in-built car radios were first introduced in the United States in the 1920s, however, informing drivers on traffic situations was not exactly on the radar of the radio manufacturers. On the contrary, they first had to counter the concern that car radio threatened road safety. An accident in which a man had been hit by a New York taxi whose driver had played car radio stirred a debate about its negative effects on driver attention. A radio lobby prevented a ban on car radio, yet radio manufacturer Philips decided to advise European drivers not to play their car radio in heavy urban traffic, but only on drives in the country. On the lonely country road, car radio might prevent drivers from falling asleep (Bijsterveld, Cleophas, Krebs, & Mom, 2014). It was the lonely road itself, however, that would gradually disappear, both in Europe and the United States. By 1960, 64 percent of all employees in the United States used a car to commute to work. A dissertation citing this figure claimed that in ‘‘most of the large United States metropolitan areas, a monumental traffic jam signals the arrival of the work day’’ (Aangeenbrug, 1965, pp. 7 and 1 respectively). In these years, car ownership and daily commuting were less widespread in Europe. But urban congestion became an issue just as well. The many narrow and winding streets of European towns and cities were not exactly freeways for the automobile (Lundin, 2008, pp. 263–264). Long before traffic jams became an everyday phenomenon in Western societies, listening to car radio had already been identified as an activity that might offer some relief. A mid-1930s American survey amongst New York taxicab drivers had indicated that radio might indeed have an alleviating role to play. Whereas some

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cab drivers reported that car radio negatively influenced their attention span or made them overhear warning signals, cab drivers also reported that it could reduce ‘‘impatience and annoyance with traffic’’ (Suchman, 1939, p. 154). These positive effects returned in-car radio advertising over the next decades. In a 1963 animated commercial which Philips made for the American market, for example, a motorist clearly struggles with heavy traffic. He expresses his frustration by hooting, driving aggressively, and reproaching others on the road. Unsurprisingly, the commercial presents a Philips car radio as the solution. ‘‘It is so easy to stay calm in heavy traffic,’’ so it argues, ‘‘when you listen to your favorite programs.’’ Everyone will benefit: ‘‘Your fellow drivers will love you, and you will love : : : Philips’’ (Philips Company Archives, 1963). Car radio was not only presented as an instrument for mood control, however, but also for traffic control. Once again, the United States took the lead. A Newark radio station broadcast traffic reports as early as 1937, and by the 1950s, ‘‘aerial traffic reporting by radio’’ had become ‘‘a regular service during the weekday rush hours in majors cities’’ (McDonald, 2008, p. 22). In Europe, the French had radio programs for drivers, such as ‘‘Route de Nuit,’’ from the mid-1950s at least (Fesneau, 2009, p. 243). By the 1970s, a Dutch car handbook author underscored that a ‘‘realistic’’ motorist could not do without ‘‘reports on the weather, roads broken up, and traffic jams’’ anymore. And as FM stations were highly active in broadcasting traffic information, these were ‘‘of particular significance to the driver’’ (Hinlopen, 1971, pp. 174, 181). In Germany, in fact, a wide variety of FM broadcasting stations provided drivers with the latest news on traffic situations and weather conditions, as well as with music to ‘‘cheer up’’ their ‘‘Rush Hour’’ (Bosch Archives, 1973, p. 2; 1972, p. 2). This rich availability of traffic broadcasts also created a problem though. For motorists it was hard to detect the most relevant FM station while driving (Bosch Archives, 1977, p. 5). The German electro-technical industry was keen to find a solution and started working on sorting out the options for a distinct traffic radio at the end of the 1960s. This turned out to be a costly affair, however, and changing existing international radio frequency arrangements happened to be highly complex as well. It took years before a joint venture of car radio manufacturer Blaupunkt, the German automobile club ADAC (Allgemeiner Deutscher AutomobilClub), the Institute for Radio Technology (Institut für Rundfunktechnik) and relevant authorities ensured the assignment of a particular range of low frequency radio bands to traffic radio. This enabled them to establish ARI, a system for AutofahrerRundfunk-Information or driver-broadcasting-information. It was officially adopted by the Federal Republic of Germany in 1974 (Bosch Archives, 1977a, p. 7; 1977b, pp. 5–6). The radio stations embedded in the ARI system acquired their traffic information from the German police and ADAC road service, and broadcast this information through the frequencies that had been assigned to the system. Blaupunkt’s car radio then picked up the signals with the help of a decoder, which had three versions. The simplest system (Senderkennung, or ‘‘station identifier’’) ensured that the car radio

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would distinguish between broadcasting stations offering traffic information and stations that did not, and gave drivers the possibility to opt out on all radio stations that fell in the second category. A more sophisticated decoder (Bereichskennung, or ‘‘range identifier’’) filtered the radio stations that broadcast information in terms of the region the driver was actually crossing. In the most highbrow ‘‘arimat’’ radios, an ‘‘announcement identifier’’ (Durchsagekennung) enabled the driver to receive traffic information even if the radio or radio-cassette player was turned off (Bosch Archives, 1974, p. 4; 1976, pp. 8–9). ARI assisted the driver, as Blaupunkt claimed, in spending time with his family instead of traffic jams (Weber, 2008, p. 149). The company’s advertisements therefore came with photos of bad weather situations, accidents, and traffic jams to which ARI was supposed to be the answer. In addition, Blaupunkt published maps that showed how the ARI system was in full operation in Western Germany and about to conquer Europe. Indeed, the system was considered so successful that the European Broadcasting Union soon advised its adoption in all of Western Europe. Austria did so already in 1976, and other European countries were to follow (Bosch Archives, 1977b, p. 7). In 1983, ARI even popped up in the United States in the New York City area, where it drew on information offered by Shadow Traffic. This company offered ‘‘traffic reports gleaned from a network of airplanes, helicopters, spotter cars, direct phone lines to the tunnel and bridge authorities and police departments, and : : : ‘regular citizen-type people,’ who take the same routes each day to their jobs and call in two-way radio reports to Shadow’’ (Angus & Harrys, 1983, p. 3). In New York the system did not survive the test phase, perhaps because the New York traffic authorities and reporting agencies, such as Shadow Traffic, already had their traffic information systems up and running for many years (Howser, 1980). Yet the magazine article announcing the news about ARI illustrated the dreams and expectations attached to traffic radio in an intriguing way. A tricked photo illustration accompanying the article showed a car simply flying across a traffic jam. Its message was clear: drivers might find an escape—if only when listening to and acting upon the radio traffic reports. By the early 1980s, indeed, traffic radio had established itself as both guard and escape. With the subsequent rise of new systems for gathering traffic information, such as live camera surveillance and ground sensors, the need for traffic reports based on live air monitoring decreased. New information and communication technologies made the available data on traffic situations also more precise. This allowed for tailoring the information more specifically to different radio stations and their audiences. In an attempt to ‘sell’ traffic information, traffic reporters would address specific groups of listeners by including details on local circumstances, or would at times even change their tone and name. Bernie Wagenblast—one of Shadow Traffic’s reporters in New York—would call himself Jack Packard only to fit the style of one of the radio stations he presented at (Hinkley, 2004). From the perspective of the driver, a close relationship between traffic radio and motorist became all the more important when, in the 1990s and after, driving

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became a visually less rich experience due to the rapid increase in the number of noise screens alongside the highways. With generally less freedom on the road— due to speed limits, matrix panels, highway maintenance efforts, traffic congestion— it is in fact highly likely that the need for traffic information will become more and more pressing. Real-time visual navigation tools will be indispensable for providing such information. The authors expect, however, that drivers will continue to listen as well. Not only because they need to keep their eyes on the road, and will thus listen to the voices of navigation, but also because the rhythm of music and the updates of news will prevent their sensory deprivation and keep them going both mentally and physically. The paradox still holds: traffic radio acts as a guard keeping its driving audience captivated by offering ways to escape.

Note 1 These data are based on observations of Dutch, German, Belgian and U.S. radio broadcasts by Marith Dieker and (for the New York area) on a personal Skype conversation by Marith Dieker with New York traffic reporter Bernie Wagenblast (November 14, 2013).

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