Gary Putterman was not a visionary. He was a middle manager in data entry whose primary ambition was to find a parking spot close to his office door. On the morning of his apotheosis, he was stuck on the I-10, staring at a cluster of brake lights that stretched into the hazy distance like a terrible, red, unblinking serpent. He was already thirty minutes late, and the traffic had been in a dead stop for forty-seven minutes, by his precise, exasperated calculation.
The source of the gridlock was invisible. There was no accident, no construction—just a relentless, phantom traffic jam. Every driver knew the pattern: one person taps the brake slightly, the person behind them brakes harder, and the third person slams on the brakes. This phenomenon, which Gary dubbed "The Slinky Effect," was purely psychological—a wave of irrational caution rippling backward at the speed of human anxiety.
Staring intently at the bumper of the minivan ahead, Gary had his moment of revelation. The problem wasn't speed; it was inconsistent speed. If every car could maintain the exact same gap and velocity, even a slow one, the congestion wave would simply dissolve. But how to coordinate millions of anxious, coffee-fueled drivers?
He reached into his briefcase and pulled out his trusty spreadsheet calculator and a neon green Post-it pad. In a moment of sheer desperation, he scrawled two large, simple emojis: a green, forward-pointing arrow, and a red, backward-pointing yield symbol. He held them up, alternating them rhythmically out his window, trying to signal to the car behind him to simply maintain his pace.
It was ridiculous. But two cars back, a driver, bored senseless, caught on to Gary's frantic signaling. They mirrored his rhythm. Soon, a handful of cars were subtly pacing each other, creating a tiny, fluid bubble in the sea of stagnation. It was the first time in an hour Gary had moved without slamming the brake.
The solution, it turned out, wasn't human signaling, but synchronized automation. The next day, Gary patented "Putterman's Pace Grid," a simple, AI-driven traffic management system. Instead of complex, central road sensors, it used a vast network of inexpensive roadside beacons connected to a proprietary app (or later, built into car dashboards). The system’s only job was to calculate the optimum, non-stop flow rate for any given segment of road and broadcast a silent, synchronized signal. This signal manifested as a gentle, non-obtrusive light on the dashboard—a soft, pulsing green if you were holding the perfect gap and speed, or a subtle amber pulse if you were braking too hard or closing the distance too fast.
It wasn't a stoplight; it was a collective heartbeat. It eliminated the Slinky Effect instantly. Highways that once moved at a staggering 15 mph now cruised at a steady 55 mph, consistently.
Gary Putterman, who had almost been fired for tardiness, became the world's savior. Congress fast-tracked the system nationwide, and every major automaker integrated it. Gary, the reluctant billionaire, was suddenly invited to summits, lauded by politicians, and dubbed “The Brake Whisperer.” He bought his old boss's company and turned the data entry office into a museum dedicated to the Post-it Note. His greatest victory? He never, ever had to worry about finding a parking spot again. He had solved traffic—the ultimate mundane problem—by simply asking millions of drivers to chill out, in unison.