We're driving along near the Oakland airport, when some jerk in a big white car blasts his horn. All I did was swerve into his lane, Judge. Another innocent victim of highway hypnosis.

Now we're tooling along Interstate 5, the world's most doze-inducing highway, and we come up on slower traffic, go around, and gradually we're driving faster and faster.

In front of me someone waits for the last possible moment to cross four lanes of traffic and make his exit.

Driving. Someone should write a book about it. Done.

Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt is a virtual encyclopedia of driving. Behavioral research fairly oozes from the pages. Traffic is so well documented it's difficult to imagine any more definitive book on the subject of cars moving through space and time.

"Tom Vanderbilt was stuck in a backup near the Holland Tunnel a few years ago when he committed a life-changing act: he became a late merger," according to his editor. "This fateful decision got him thinking about the nature of traffic, and before he knew it he was interviewing engineers and experts from Los Angeles to London to New Delhi and beyond."

"In 1720," Vanderbilt notes, "traffic fatalities from 'furiously driven' carts and coaches were named the leading cause of death in London (eclipsing fire and immoderate quaffing). In New York in the 1800s "horses were killing an average of four pedestrians a week (a bit higher than today's rate of traffic fatalities, although there were far fewer people and far fewer vehicles)."

The speed limit was five miles an hour. "Just when it seemed as if things could not get more complicated, along came a novel and controversial machine, the first new form of personal transportation since the days of Caesar's Rome, a newfangled contrivance that upset the fragile balance of traffic. I am talking, of course," Vanderbilt says, "about the bicycle."

The author explodes driving myths with impeccable logic. He explains why it's so hard to pay attention in traffic, how our driving eyes deceive us, why we are inefficient parkers, what's wrong with traffic signs, and answers questions you didn't think to ask, such as, "If driving is so easy, why is it so hard for a robot?"

The other lane is NOT always moving faster; it just seems that way. Cars in lanes move accordion style. The lines of cars expand and contract. Those who switch lanes aggressively save about four minutes every 80 miles. The danger and anxiety are hardly worth it.

"We are how we move," Vanderbilt says. On foot we hate cars, those "loud, polluting annoyances." As drivers, "pedestrians suddenly are the menace, whacked-out iPod drones." As bike riders we "get the worst of all worlds, buffeted by speeding cars whose drivers resent (our) superior health and fuel economy, and hounded by oblivious pedestrians who seem to think it's safe to cross against the light 'if only a bike' is coming."

Drivers inhabit a muted world in which no one outside the car can hear us and we can't hear them. Rant, rave, plead or shout. It doesn't register. On the road we live according to rules of the jungle. Anthropologists say that monkey top bananas display butts to their inferiors to produce feelings of subservience. It's the same for the driving tribe. We're mad because we're mute and unhappy because we're staring at automotive rear ends. This is not a recipe for sane driving.

About that time I cut off that driver in Oakland. Vanderbilt suggests, "There is no way for the offending driver (in this case, me) to indicate that it was anything but rude or hostile... in traffic, first impressions are usually the only impressions."

There's much, much more in this informative book. If you or someone you know has a drivers licence and uses it, you would do well to look at this book. Traffic will never be the same.

Aired Sunday August 17, 2008 at 10:55 am and Wednesday August 20, 2008 at 1:00 pm

Orders/Information:

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt. Alfred A. Knopf Publisher hardcover $24.95. ISBN 9780307264787.

Title of final chapter: "Why You Shouldn't Drive with a Beer-drinking Divorced Doctor Named Fred on Super Bowl Sunday in a Pickup Truck in Rural Montana: What's Risky on the Road and Why."

The author's blog: http://www.howwedrive.com/ Did you know there are "queing theorists"?

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