When I was small, on those weekly drives to and from the hospital, I studied the traffic. The drive up was never slow, in those days of the mid-late 1970s, but often we stayed long enough to hit rush hour on the way home. I would watch the lane next to us, see whether we caught up to a particular car again, whether it caught up to us. Both of these happened often; each crowded lane would ebb and flow in turn. Sometimes there were cars who dodged and wove the best they could, trying to find the "right" lane for that moment, with incomplete success. On surface streets, I would sometimes notice with satisfaction that cars who blew past us had stopped at a red light, allowing us to catch them. Mom would sometimes point them out, how we the station wagon tortoise had caught the silly impatient hare.

Sometime in elementary school, I took a test that asked me whether some lanes in a road move faster than others, or whether they all moved at the same speed. Thinking of the evening-out of ebb and flow through a crowded rush hour, I answered that they all moved the same. This was judged a wrong answer. My annoyed elementary school self judged it an imprecise question.

Now I am grown up, and over twenty years later there are several more cars in Los Angeles; on the same freeways I dodge and weave among the tortoises both morning and night (though I am not the speediest hare in the race, not nearly), mainly from innate impatience, but also because I have never really stopped watching the traffic. I have noticed that sometimes this method indeed does not make a difference; the tortoises and hares wait at the red light together. But sometimes, sometimes the hare makes it through the yellow light. Sometimes the hare has driven the same freeway at the same time of day often enough to look farther ahead than most, and see the red taillights, and change towards the right to avoid the backup, to the left to avoid the merging 105ers, back to the right after they've gone towards the left, back towards the left in the carpool canyon because for some reason the right lanes lose their magic in there, and stay left because the 10 interchange is coming.

The test, on the whole, was right, but I still maintain it was an imprecise question.