Books

Traffic: Why we drive the way we do
By Tom Vanderbilt; Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2008, 286 pp.

The joy of reading about the passage of cars on a roadway — normally a dry topic, unless you're interested in road rage — stems from the relevance traffic has for all adults.

Whether waiting on the daily Oxford school caravan, prowling for a parking space around Jacksonville State University or suddenly noticing your lane on Quintard Avenue is about to disappear — hello, 18th Street! — we Calhoun Countians have our own traffic tales of woe.

Sure, they don't rise from the fertile ground of interstates in Boston or Atlanta, but they're ours.

That's why Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do is such a blast.

The young writer has drawn from scholarly work of dozens of researchers, as well as his own investigations, to hold up a mirror to motorists' behavior in all sorts of settings, from Los Angeles freeways to Anytown parking lots. Yet he explains his topics in an informal, even breezy style at times, writing in the first person so we don't feel like we're reading an engineering textbook.

And to keep us turning the pages, Vanderbilt employs a variety of images, from the cannibalistic behavior of locusts to the utter chaos of streets in New Delhi.

"Much as I don't like the presence of a cow on the road when I am advocating smoother traffic and convenience," the author's guide in the Indian megalopolis explains about one of the unique features there, "the presence of a cow also forces a person to slow down."

(More than a hundred years ago, cows grazed on the Quintard parkway of Anniston. Perhaps it's time to bring them back.)

As for the locusts, Vanderbilt uses their massively brainless yet well-timed and seemingly intentional behavior to explain how gridlock can occur: "Like the pattern of locusts' movement, human traffic movement often tends to change at a point of critical density. In a reversal of the way that locusts go from disorder to order with the addition of a few locusts, with the addition of just a few cars, smoothly flowing traffic can change into a congested mess."

But all is not scholarly in Vanderbilt's book. He tells us the item that most frequently falls on the L.A. freeways — ladders — and explains why cloverleaf interchanges, once a popular device for getting vehicles on and off the interstate, have fallen out of favor. It's because cloverleafs dump new vehicles into traffic lanes at just about the same point where similar lanes contain vehicles that are trying to leave them.

"Engineers call this the 'weaving section,' a mysterious, traffic-tossed tempest full of what [they] call 'turbulence' and 'friction,' in which people coming onto and getting off the highway end up in each other's way," Vanderbilt tells us.

"We never did have a cookbook when we started building the Interstate," Vanderbilt quotes one Federal Highway Administration highway designer as saying — an interesting counterpoint for anyone who always heard that America's interstates were based on Germany's autobahn.

Parking lot behavior, the most dangerous roads and whether a driver should merge early or late on an unexpectedly narrowed highway are just a few of the other topics Vanderbilt covers in a book that's so interesting, you shouldn't read it while driving.