BY TOM VANDERBILT
ALLEN LANE, 416pp, £20THERE ARE LOTS OF BOOKS ON holidays, sex and food, and very few on traffic, even though, as Tom Vanderbilt points out, traffic might well take up more of our time than any of these thin
gs. Sitting in traffic is one of the big things about our lives. We talk about it a lot. But we don't read about it very much. I'm very glad I read this book, though. At just under 300 pages, it tells you a lot about traffic. But of course, it's really a book about human nature.
First, let me tell you a few facts. This book is full of facts. If you read it, you'll be bursting to tell people about them. Americans spend about 38 hours a year stuck in traffic. Only 16 per cent of American children walk to school. Audiobooks, which hardly existed 20 years ago, owe their existence to traffic. Traffic-calming does not calm traffic. There are a lot more fatal accidents in Belgium than there are in Holland.
Bad things happen in traffic, partly because we're going so fast. We have evolved to cope with speeds of up to 20mph, the fastest a human being can run. Faster than that and the possibility of eye contact is lost. In a car, we feel liberated from the usual constraints. "Anonymity in traffic acts as a powerful drug," Vanderbilt tells us. We also suffer from what sociologists call the "nose-pick factor" – picking one's nose in the car. People do this even when they're aware of being filmed for an experiment.
This book is full of the fruits of research by academics and traffic experts – Vanderbilt has compiled it extremely well. A lot of research is, worryingly, counter-intuitive. There's the Pelzman effect – having safer cars does not add up to fewer fatalities. Safe cars might encourage people to take more risks. There's Smeed's law, which tells us that, as you might expect, the number of road fatalities in any given country increases with the number of cars in that country. Until a certain point, that is, when the fatality rates begin to drop, even as the numbers of cars rise. And then there's the Braess paradox, which tells us that more roads can lead to more, rather than less, congestion.
Understanding traffic is not much easier than understanding the weather. It's influenced by technology, crowd behaviour, hormones, alcohol and town planning. Talking of which, Vanderbilt interviews the Dutch planner who famously removed road signs from various parts of Holland, with a positive result. Signs, it seems, make us feel more like we're part of an impersonal traffic system and less like humans interacting with each other. Similarly, safe-looking roads are often very dangerous – just because they look safe. Read this book: it might make you a better driver.
The full article contains 500 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
