KEY POINTS:
Anyone who claims to be able to drive well and talk on a mobile phone at the same time is lying. In fact, any boast of competence on the road is a good indication that someone is a terrible driver. It suggests he - and it probably is a he - has no idea how hard driving is. To underestimate the challenge is always to be on the brink of suicide or manslaughter.
At high speeds, our senses, our reactions, our risk-assessing antennae don't work properly. So when we get behind the wheel of a car, stripped of critical faculties and clad in mechanical armour, we become simultaneously more stupid and more powerful.
It is a combination that does not bring out the best in humanity, as Tom Vanderbilt discovers in Traffic, a breezily profound investigation into, as the book's subtitle puts it, Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What it Says About Us). If the topic sounds banal, that is rather the point: we have become desensitised to the awesome complexity of life on the road.
Manoeuvring through traffic is one of the most mentally taxing things any of us does. Vanderbilt meets engineers who have tried unsuccessfully to build robots capable of doing it. The sheer volume of sensory data is too much for the most sophisticated artificial brain.
But then, Homo sapiens has hardly mastered the art. And while driving feels easier the more you do it, the level of risk doesn't change much. The cocky mobile phone user thinks that because he has never crashed while writing a text message, he won't do in the future. But it isn't skill that has kept him safe - it's luck.
Real evidence, as opposed to the subjective idiocy of the average motorist, is what fuels Vanderbilt's study. He has travelled the world looking at people's behaviour while driving and at how policy makers have tried to influence it.
Occasionally, Traffic reads like a geeky dissertation on the relative merits of rival highway codes. But most of the time it is a richly extended metaphor for the challenge of organising competing human needs and imperfect human judgment into harmonious co-existence.
Vanderbilt does not so much build a thesis as a neat chain of interlinking paradoxes. The first is his observation that car culture is militantly individualistic, but driving is, by necessity, a very social affair. Most people on the road are in private vehicles, projections of personal space where they listen to music, eat, drink and ruminate.
Surveys consistently find that, while people hate being stuck in traffic, they also have preferred minimum commuting times. They see a good quarter of an hour spent in the car as "quality time" or "me time".
Inconveniently, these mobile sitting rooms have to navigate around each other, which also means signalling their intentions. That is hard enough when locked into a chrome carapace, let alone when also moving at speed.
The difficulty of communicating with each other on the road, combined with the necessity of trying to if we want to survive, is a recipe for stress. It is the source of most episodes of road rage, which Vanderbilt more accurately calls "traffic tantrums".
In the private realm of a car, we expect to be able to use certain basic social tools, speech, for example. When we find these are of no use, we experience something like the exasperation of the toddler, whose capacity for self-expression has not developed at pace with the complexity of its needs. The problem is compounded by an illusion of anonymity.
Sensing that we are somehow invisible in the chassis, we perpetrate impoliteness that would be unthinkable face-to-face. Just a hint of exposure is enough to moderate our behaviour. In one study, a car was set up to stall at a green traffic signal and the reactions of the following drivers were observed. Those in open-topped convertibles were much less likely to hoot.
Vanderbilt compares this phenomenon to the disinhibition that accompanies anonymity in internet traffic. Blogs and web chatrooms are essentially social spaces, but traditional protocols of civility often break down. Strangers hurl abuse at each other over trivial disagreements.
The internet, like the road, is a network where technology generates new, impersonal interactions at such a rate that our pedestrian troglodyte social skills cannot cope.
We fall back on primal, selfish instincts. Put another way, the network is a common resource that we aren't good at sharing. On the road, we struggle to put our individual needs - the assumed urgency of our journey - in the context of the collective need - everyone else has a destination too.
That leads to Vanderbilt's second paradox: the slower we all go, the faster we'll all get there. The main cause of traffic fatalities is cars bumping into stationary objects and pedestrians. But the main cause of big traffic jams is cars bumping into each other, which they do because they are moving too fast for drivers to judge the risk involved.
Yet making people slow down isn't easy. They ignore speed limits or, rather, they see them as a guide to what drivers less skilful and in less of a hurry should do. Devices intended to control traffic flow often make people behave recklessly. They accelerate wildly away from traffic lights and in between speed bumps.
This leads to Vanderbilt's third paradox: to make roads safer, sometimes you have to make them more randomly hazardous. Streets are generally designed to compensate for human stupidity. Cars are guided by thick white lines down lanes wide enough to allow meandering. Helpful signs announce the existence of bends as if the curve in the road wasn't enough to prompt the driver to turn the steering wheel.
This approach to road design is meant, in engineering terms, to be "forgiving" - it assumes people will make mistakes and indulges them. The problem is that, on the road at least, when you forgive people, they take liberties. Our capacity for seeking risk expands to fill the space given to it. We drive as fast as the road will let us and then a bit faster. We are more complacent about hazards when we are warned they are coming. Give us a nice, safe, straight road and we fall asleep at the wheel.
We are safer when we drive as if anything may happen at any moment.
Vanderbilt cites approvingly the example of Dutch engineer Hans Monderman, who has pioneered a counterintuitive approach to laying out roads - let people work out the hazards for themselves. That means no signs, no traffic lights, no lanes, no crash barriers and, in the most radical cases, blurring the distinction between road and pavement. Instead of hemming people in and herding them across streets at allocated points, you encourage them to spill out all over the place.
You make drivers crawl in a state of hyper-alertness, negotiating their position in constant deference to each other. The idea is that you can design town and village centres so that pedestrian society impinges on the world of the car and not the other way around.
It is possible that this could only work in the Netherlands, as the expression of some national quirk. Each society's driving ethos is unique.
(Vanderbilt has a data-laden chapter on the correlation between a country's GDP, levels of official corruption and road safety.) But the point of the Dutch experiment is that, unlike standard traffic management, it aims to change the culture rather than the rules of the road. Vanderbilt draws a distinction between "norms" and "laws" governing behaviour. Many drivers will merrily ignore the speed limit on an empty road late at night and then patiently wait at a red light, although they can see the junction is clear.
Speeding is just as illegal as jumping a light, but it is more normal.
In the absence of an outburst of collective will to change our norms, the next best thing is rigorously enforcing laws. Vanderbilt is no libertarian. He reluctantly approves of speed cameras (better some sanction for going too fast than none at all) and he supports congestion charging. People will only rationally evaluate the importance of a journey when they have to pay for it.
But Traffic is not a book of policy prescriptions. Perhaps wisely, Vanderbilt does not try to solve the question of how people are supposed to share common space while pursuing their private agendas, which is, after all, a basic challenge of civilisation.
Accordingly, the book lacks a clear conclusion. Most of our traffic problems seem to come down to the innate weaknesses of our species - inability to judge risk, thrill-seeking; solipsism, greed. We have been stuck in the same jam for centuries. The only difference technology makes is that, in a car, we can go nowhere even faster.
- OBSERVER
