On East Newton Street by the southbound entrance to Interstate 5, locals voice their concerns about intersections that are not "pedestrian friendly." The protesters were part of a roving band that recently marched around pushing for changes - such as a new crosswalk - that would help people on foot.

HOSE WHO DRAW the lines say the distance between order and chaos is precisely 4 inches.

Knowing this, and fearing chaos, they fill those 4 inches with paint so bright you can see it at night, paint engineered to dry almost instantly, paint mixed with tiny glass beads to increase its reflectivity and chemically enhanced to withstand the forces of nature.

	Joyce Robinson of Seattle Transportation has a point to make as she deftly pushes a traffic button into a dollop of tar on lower Queen Anne Hill.

They are not messing around, these line-drawers, because with their 4-inch-wide stripes they believe they are defending a basic pillar of American life: the ability to drive from here to there without too much confusion.

Imagine: There was a time, just over 100 years ago, when the automobile was a new idea and the road ahead had no lines. A time when intersections were unmarked and every state in the Union could come up with its own symbol for "Stop."

It was this state of affairs that gave rise to the first traffic engineers. You've heard the saying, "If God didn't exist, humans would have to create one." Same with these guys.

Look around and you'll see their work. Today the nation is awash in orderly roadways, well-designed intersections and clearly worded signs.

Or, at least, that is the idea. The problem is, sometimes these well-intentioned people who have come to tame chaos actually end up creating more chaos. It's a paradox of modern life: The more we try to refine our instruments of control, the more we increase the potential for disorder.

This is what happened recently at a key Seattle intersection. This is why, one day last fall, three big letters written in red spray paint appeared near a fresh set of 4-inch-wide yellow lines. The lines had been laid down as part of an effort to improve traffic flow at the intersection of 10th Avenue East and East Roanoke Street. The red letters read: WHY?

These rebel "traffic engineers" from Fremont are still on the loose, though they committed a misdemeanor last September by painting their own crosswalk and installing illegal stop signs at the intersection of Phinney Avenue North and North 35th Street. The tools of their trade: brushes, paint and two wooden posts. One person involved in the rebellion was arrested and later fined for assaulting a Seattle Transportation worker who came to take down the signs.
There are no squiggly lines from Gerry Reid, who after 20 years on the job knows how to lay down the perfect 4-inch-wide traffic stripe. "You get a lot of self-gratification out of a line you just laid that looks nice," he says. "I think everybody does."

EVERY TRAFFIC intersection presents an opportunity for an existential crisis. Two concrete paths cross, and all of a sudden you are tangling with life's biggest questions:

How did I get here?

Where am I going?

How will I know when to make my move?

Who goes first, you or me?

And, of course, the question painted in red: WHY?

This last question shall be answered shortly, by a well-respected civil servant who carries a big book called the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices.

But first, you should know: In Seattle, there are more than 1,200 intersections — enough to provide you with a fresh existential crisis every single day for three years.

WE ARE APPROACHING the intersection of 10th and Roanoke, but before we get there, let's talk for a minute about free will. This is the rascally idea that we humans are masters of our own destiny, that our actions are self-controlled, our fate is in our hands.

Put this belief behind the wheel of a car and you get the average American driver.

"It started with the first century of car society. It was the open road. People who owned cars were identified with freedom and 'Do what you want!' and 'Get out of my way!' "

That's Leon James talking. He's a professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii and an expert on the mentality of the American driver. The strong psychological association between driving and free will remains to this day, he says.

We see it in commercials, when SUVs scale mountains. We hear it in Bruce Springsteen lyrics: Sprung from cages/out on Highway 9/chrome wheeled, fuel injected/and steppin' out over the line. We watch the classic road-rebel movie Easy Rider. We buy cars called Roadmaster, TrailBlazer, Expedition. As teenagers, a rite of passage is to land the keys to the family car — the keys, in other words, to freedom.

All well and good, assuming everyone knows how to handle the freedom. But what about the selfish, the show-offs, the stubborn and the foolish? Traffic engineers actually have a guess of how many of us fall into these categories on any given day — about 15 percent. Too often, James says, people in cars "are unprepared to handle their emotions, so that anything that holds them up becomes their target."

Such is the outcome of the free-will mentality. James would like to point out that this mentality represents "a totally unenlightened and unrealistic attitude."

THOSE WHO DRAW the lines tend to agree.

"You can't always drive your car 'free-will,' " says the man with the big book, also known as Gerry Willhelm, director of traffic management for Seattle Transportation, the government agency that exists to manage our local street traffic.

In his downtown Seattle office filled with thick three-ring binders, Willhelm speaks in terms reminiscent of a theory more than 350 years old — a theory that helped create society as we know it.

You may be familiar with this theory, voiced by philosopher Thomas Hobbes. The idea, essentially, is that we humans have a natural tendency to act in accordance with our free will, but when we all follow this impulse to be free, life becomes, as Hobbes famously wrote, "nasty, brutish and short."

In order to live long and prosper, his theory goes, we must all surrender some of our free will to a greater political power: the state. The state, in turn, pays people such as Willhelm to draw the lines that keep us under control.

To Willhelm and those he works with, a world in which everyone made up their own rules of the road would be a nightmare — a Hobbesian Nightmare.

"Chaos," says Willhelm.

"A free-for all," says Gerry Reid, who drives a city road-painting truck. "You need the lines."

"Total civil unrest. Period," says Tammy Ravert, who oversees the crews that fix defaced street signs.

	Lima Viaese, left, and Steve Erickson of Seattle Transportation paint warning lines for a Metro bus stop on Capitol Hill. Even though these two work for the powers that make the traffic rules, they are not above the law. On this day, a by-the-book traffic enforcer caught them blocking a 7-to-9 a.m. restricted lane and gave them a ticket.

And the psychologist, James, after considering the idea that average people might be able to make up their own rules of the road, says:

"Obviously, this is a kind of insanity. It's a kind of insanity where your rational mind lapses, because it's obvious that traffic control has to be done by some central authority. This is not going to be fair for everybody, but the alternative is much, much worse."

Perhaps the alternative would be a bit like the parking lot in front of the Seattle Transportation sign shop. This shop holds the tools of order: new road signs, line-painting trucks. But in its parking lot there are no lines, no parking stalls, nothing to tell you where to stick your vehicle. The result: cars at funny angles, wasted space, disorder.

NOW WE KNOW the answer to the general "Why?"

Because the alternative is worse.

And worse not just in terms of efficiency and philosophy, the engineers would like to point out, but also in terms of safety. Even with all the lines and signs in Seattle, about 20,000 traffic accidents happen each year, with a societal cost of about $500 million, not to mention the human cost.

Still, there remains the big red WHY?, the one that was sprayed last fall on 10th Avenue East near the intersection with East Roanoke Street. The one that has since faded into almost nothingness while the chemically-fortified 4-inch-wide yellow lines that surround it go on glowing. The one that has never been fully answered.

To be precise, the full question posed in red to the sky above, to the drivers speeding by, perhaps to anyone who would listen, came in two parts and stretched over about 30 feet of cement. It read:

"WHY IS IT HERE?" and "What (double underlined) Is This For (single underlined)?"

The author of these questions is unknown, but it is safe to assume the red paint referred to the new yellow road lines, which appeared last August as part of an effort by Seattle Transportation to change the traffic patterns at 10th and Roanoke.

It also seems safe to assume the spray-painter wasn't alone in feeling mystified by the traffic improvement. At the nearby Roanoke Tavern, the bartender said his regulars had been grumbling. At Chris' hair salon two blocks away, one client vowed no new yellow paint would slow him down, and the owner, Chris Wurgler, waived his ringed hands in the air and suggested the whole thing was part of an attempt to "thin out" traffic.

The silk-screens used to make signs at Seattle Transportation's sign shop on Airport Way South are reminiscent of work by American painter Jasper Johns, who made art from everyday images and icons.

HERE IS HOW this troublesome intersection is formed: From the crest of Capitol Hill, 10th Avenue East runs northward toward Roanoke Park. When it hits the park, rather than running over the grass and shrubs and drinking fountain, it politely stops. At this point, it also collides with a street running from east to west along the park's edge: East Roanoke Street. Where the two roads meet, they form an intersection in the shape of a T.

This T-shaped intersection happens to sit above the mother of all T-shaped Seattle intersections: The spot where Highway 520 sprouts eastward from Interstate 5. Because of this, much of the traffic at the intersection of 10th and Roanoke is concerned with getting on and off one of the city's two freeways. Which makes the area around 10th and Roanoke something traffic engineers like to call a "connector corridor."

However, this is a connector corridor in the middle of a small neighborhood filled with half-million-dollar houses. A neighborhood that is home to a feisty citizens' coalition and four schools whose students ply the sidewalks. A neighborhood where in 1969 (a year when protests were concerned mostly with the Vietnam War) a group of placard-wielding activists took over an intersection claiming it was unfriendly to pedestrians — and proving that all it takes to spark chaos is a will and a gripe.

THE THINKING behind the change to the lines at 10th and Roanoke is complicated, but it begins with the neighborhood citizens' group, which wanted people to slow down. No one knows quite why this happens, but people tend to drive slower on streets with trees planted down the center. So of course, the neighborhood residents wanted trees planted down the center of 10th Avenue as it approaches Roanoke, because cars go fast down 10th Avenue.

But there was a problem: Just before it hits Roanoke, 10th Avenue becomes a bridge crossing over 520.

"There's certain things you can't do," says Phil Thordarson, traffic operations manager for Seattle Transportation. "They were hoping to go across the bridge with this nice median that had trees in it and all that stuff. Of course we said they could not do that. You can't put a planted strip on a bridge. There's all kinds of problems with that."

Drainage problems. Maintenance problems. Weight problems.

	Along the road, signs and cars intersect, sometimes with unfortunate consequences. On Capitol Hill, this stop sign ended up under a wheel, but nobody can say just how. Or why.

A compromise was reached. There would be a trial period in which the outlines of a new median would be drawn on the bridge. Later, maybe, a median would be built to hold low-lying shrubs or ivy — but certainly no trees.

Shortly after the median was sketched last fall, a minor rebellion began. The new lines erased a southbound lane from the bridge, turning it into the new median. Seattle Transportation officials figured that wasn't a big deal since southbound 10th Avenue narrows to one lane shortly after the bridge, anyway.

But people were used to having two southbound lanes on the bridge, and they immediately became confused and indignant. Some blatantly ignored the new lines, driving right over them, directly through the future beds of shrubs. Others performed strange maneuvers trying to comply with the new rules, which were not helped by traffic lights that continued to suggest that there were two lanes to turn into when only one remained.

Why haven't the lights been changed? Short answer: Because the big book's rules cannot be bent, says Thordarson. (You don't want the long answer.)

Given all this, it was not surprising when the WHY? appeared. The existential question posed by this intersection had suddenly become: At what point do I rebel?

"We went out and made a change to a traffic pattern that has existed for as long as I've been here," says Willhelm, who has worked with Seattle Transportation for more than 30 years. "And from a traffic-engineering perspective, there was no reason to make the change. And so it appears unreasonable to some motorists who are driving through the neighborhood. You know, 'Why did those idiots ... ' " his sentence trails off. "And that's probably why that person wrote what he wrote out there."

AS A CALL TO civic rebellion, "Why did those idiots" turns out to be pretty potent — and common.

People who act on this feeling, James says, often do so because they see themselves as being forced into a situation that is illogical.

New lines don't make sense. Signs are confusing. The city won't come out and put in a crosswalk.

"And you begin to think, irrationally, that this is a conspiracy against me and people like me. And as soon as you have that thought, you are empowered, so to speak, into a protest attitude. And as soon as you are in that mode of thinking you begin to do rash things which are dangerous to everybody and totally illogical — and you cannot get away with it."

This is what led to rebel crosswalks and stop signs being installed last September at the Fremont intersection of North 35th Street and Phinney Avenue North. The question involved there was, "Why won't those idiots at Seattle Transportation install an all-way stop and crosswalks at this dicey intersection?"

Stop-sign posts are stacked neatly at Seattle Transportation's storage yard.

The answer, from Willhelm: "The traffic volumes on Phinney were 10 times greater than the traffic volumes on 35th. So it didn't make sense to put in an all-way stop."

This was not a satisfactory answer to parts of Fremont.

"We had seen an accident like every four months," said Kathleen Emry, owner of Free Range Cycles, which sits on the corner of 35th and Phinney. "Not until they had that civil disobedience did anybody ever take action on this corner."

The civil disobedience happened on Sept. 16 of last year when a bunch of people — estimates range from 12 to 30, depending upon how much the speaker wants to dilute responsibility — grabbed brushes and paint and posts and signs and redesigned the intersection themselves.

The result: One activist was arrested for allegedly assaulting a Seattle Transportation worker who came to take down the unauthorized stop signs. The activist was later fined $3,600. And city crews blasted away the crosswalks, which people say looked a little bit crooked anyway.

The intersection is now a two-way stop, and the Fremont rebels have no plans to touch it up to their liking. Lesson: It may take arrests and fines and high-pressure hoses, but order can be restored.

At 10th and Roanoke, the new yellow lines are still in their "trial period," accidents are down, and once-confused motorists seem to have gotten used to the change. Lesson: People will adapt to almost anything, but push them too far too fast and they will shout in big red letters.

The days of vigilante traffic engineering in Seattle are not likely to be over, though. Tammy Ravert, the woman who spoke earlier of "total civil unrest" and whose job is to combat those who take traffic management into their own hands, says unauthorized crosswalks or illegally installed traffic signs appear about twice a month.

Turns out anyone can legally buy a street sign — it's when you plant the sign in your parking strip that it becomes illegal. Recently, Ravert's crew took out a handful of vigilante 2-hour-parking signs. Now she's battling mysterious forces that are modifying stop signs to say STOP BREEDING or STOP EATING ANIMALS. And she's always on the lookout for unauthorized red paint on curbs.

Ravert is pleased to note she hasn't seen any renegade crosswalk installations yet this year. Then again, she says, summer's just begun.

ONE DAY LAST spring Gerry Reid, the man who spoke of a "free-for-all" and the need for lines, was out near Green Lake in his two-ton truck making rules the way that makes people listen: with guns.

"You just turn on both your guns and ride down the street," he said, explaining how one creates the double-yellow traffic lines that mean: Don't Cross!

"You get a lot of self-gratification out of a line you just laid that looks nice. I think everybody does."

Around Green Lake, things had gotten a little unclear in places. Boundaries were blurring. Reid pointed his guns at the spot where a line had to be drawn anew, and pushed a button. Paint shot out in a stream of authority precisely 4 inches wide.

"I never thought about it being a powerful job," he says, though he has been doing it for 20 years. "It's kinda fun to paint."

Does it amaze him that people follow the rules he lays down for a living?

Signs are surprisingly large, 2 feet by 8 feet for this crosswalk sign being cleaned by Clay Allen at the Seattle Transportation sign shop.

"What amazes me more is that we put the lines down and people don't follow them."

As for lines that don't make sense — well, he says, they had to make sense to somebody sometime.

We have been here before, but it's worth asking again: Why do people follow the lines?

"People are conditioned to. 'Hey, we gotta stay between the lines.' That's the way we're brought up."

Does he understand why someone might be motivated to go out and paint WHY? in big red letters at a confusing intersection?

"You drive the same street every day, the same lines every day, and then BOOM!, one day there's a change and you've been driving that street for the past 20 years, you don't want to change."

He understands. This personification of order, the man who fires the guns that draw the lines that make the rules, can see the meaning in the chaos.

Which raises an interesting possibility: Perhaps all those personifications of free will out there in their cars can accept that sometimes it's between mystifying lines that we find the most interesting meanings.

Eli Sanders is a former Seattle Times staff reporter now free-lancing in Seattle. Alan Berner is a Seattle Times news photographer.