You probably don’t think too much about your daily commute, but one filmmaker wants to make it the subject of his next documentary. With more Americans moving to cities, traffic is getting worse. Documentarian Todd Drezner hopes to find out what cities are doing about it through his film, In Transit, that’s been in the works since last year.
“Traffic can really tell us far more about a city than we might think at first glance,” Drezner told Ditmas Park Corner.
He highlights, for example, the recent horrific gridlock in Atlanta that caused the whole city to come to a halt after a few inches of snow. “[It] was not actually about southern drivers not being able to drive in the snow. Rather, it was the result of the fact that only about half a million people live in the city of Atlanta itself, while the population of the metropolitan area is around six million,” he said. “There’s no public transportation that covers the whole region, so when everyone tried to get home at the same time, they took the only form of transportation they could — cars.”
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He continued, “So the traffic jam was actually the result of years and years of decisions made by many different people about a city’s infrastructure. That’s a specific story that proves a more general rule: traffic is not about cars; it’s about people.”
Drezner has already interviewed experts in Detroit and New York and recently raised enough funds through his Kickstarter campaign to film in traffic-heavy cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. Check out the trailer here.