Traffic

by Tom Vanderbilt, Allen Lane, 416pp, £20. Strange things happen when people get behind the wheel of a car, said Tim Lott in The Sunday Telegraph. Once inside a vehicle, our capacity to communicate is reduced to "honks, flashes and hand gestures"; consequently, we are often misinterpreted - which is frustrating and a prime cause of road rage. The problem is worsened by the sense of anonymity and isolation that modern cars bring. Crucially, above 20mph we lose eye contact, "one of the most basic regulators of behaviour".

The road, it emerges, is a remarkable laboratory for examining what kind of creatures we are. "This is why Tom Vanderbilt's book on driving and systems of transport - on the face of it a somewhat dry topic - is such a fascinating read."

"People in their cars, watched only by researchers' cameras, sing, nose-pick and cry," said Bryan Appleyard in The Sunday Times. The latter has its own technical name: "grieving while driving".

Traffic is full of intriguing insights. New cars crash more often than old ones (nobody knows why). People honk less at high-status cars than lower-status ones. Cyclists who use hand signals cause more crashes than those who use none at all. But the central, counter-intuitive truth about driving is this: the safer we feel, the worse we drive.

Deaths and injuries to pedestrians on Kensington High Street dropped by 60 per cent when most of the road "safety" features such as the signs and railings were removed. The Dutch engineer Hans Monderman stripped out all the speed limits from the village of Oudehaske and made it hard to tell where the kerb started and the road ended; drivers immediately drove much more slowly and considerately.

By contrast, straight motorways, thick white guiding lines, and big safe cars encourage us to drive carelessly, even to fall asleep. The experts say that the ultimate road safety device would be a dagger on the steering column, pointed directly at the driver's heart.

In America, Traffic has been the surprise publishing success of the summer, said Christopher Caldwell in the FT. It's not hard to see why: people spend much of their lives in cars. Regulating traffic is now a major role of governments, which study it in great detail.

Vanderbilt has absorbed much of this research, and his book is "quite readable, albeit in that bantering, overly personal hey-what-the heck style" of much US pop science writing. All in all, it amounts to "something like a treatise on human nature".

FIRST POSTED SEPTEMBER 11, 2008