Traffic_ Why We Drive The Way We Do Part 9

The psychologist Gerald Wilde would call what was happening "risk homeostasis." This theory implies that people have a "target level" of risk: Like a home thermostat set to a certain temperature, it may fluctuate a bit from time to time but generally keeps the same average setting. "With that reliable rip cord," Wilde told me at his home in Kingston, Ontario, "people would want to extend their trip in the sky as often as possible. Because a skydiver wants to be up there, not down here."

In traffic, we routinely adjust the risks we're willing to take as the expected benefit grows. Studies, as I mentioned earlier in the book, have shown that cars waiting to make left turns against oncoming traffic will accept smaller gaps in which to cross (i.e., more risk) the longer they have been waiting (i.e., as the desire for completing the turn increases). Thirty seconds seems to be the limit of human patience for left turns before we start to ramp up our willingness for risk.

We may also act more safely as things get more dangerous. Consider snowstorms. We've all seen footage of vehicles slowly spinning and sliding their way down freeways. The news talks dramatically of the numbers of traffic deaths "blamed on the snowstorm." But something interesting is revealed in the crash statistics: During snowstorms, the number of collisions, relative to those on clear days, goes up, but the number of fatal crashes goes down. down. The snow danger seems to cut both ways: It's dangerous enough that it causes more drivers to get into collisions, and dangerous enough that it forces them to drive at speeds that are less likely to produce a fatal crash. It may also, of course, force them not to drive in the first place, which itself is a form of risk adjustment. The snow danger seems to cut both ways: It's dangerous enough that it causes more drivers to get into collisions, and dangerous enough that it forces them to drive at speeds that are less likely to produce a fatal crash. It may also, of course, force them not to drive in the first place, which itself is a form of risk adjustment.

In moments like turning left across traffic, the risk and the payoff seem quite clear and simple. But do we behave consistently, and do we really have a sense of the actual risk or safety we're looking to achieve? Are we always pushing it "to the max," and do we even know what that "max" is? Critics of risk homeostasis have said that given how little humans actually know about a.s.sessing risk and probability, and given how many mis-perceptions and biases we're susceptible to while driving, it's simply expecting too much of us to think we're able to hold to some perfect risk "temperature." A cyclist, for example, may feel safer riding on the sidewalk instead of the street. But several studies have found that cyclists are more likely to be involved in a crash when riding on the sidewalk. Why? Sidewalks, though separated from the road, cross not only driveways but intersections-where most car-bicycle collisions happen. The driver, having already begun her turn, is less likely to expect-and thus to see-a bicyclist emerging from the sidewalk. The cyclist, feeling safer, may also be less on the lookout for cars.

The average person, the criticism goes, is hardly aware of what their chances actually would be of surviving a severe crash while wearing a seat belt or protected by the unseen air bag lurking inside the steering wheel. Then again, as any trip to Las Vegas will demonstrate, we seem quite capable of making confident choices based on imperfect information of risk and odds. The loud, and occasionally vicious, debate over "risk compensation" and its various offshoots seems less about whether it can happen and more about whether it always happens, or exactly why.

Most researchers agree that behavioral adaptation seems more robust in response to direct feedback. When you can actually feel something, it's easier to change your behavior in response to it. We cannot feel air bags and seat belts at work, and we do not regularly test their capabilities-if they make us feel safer, that sense comes from something besides the devices themselves. Driving in snow, on the other hand, we don't have to rely on internalized risk calculations: One can feel how dangerous or safe it is through the act of driving. (Some studies have shown that drivers with studded winter tires drive faster than those without them.) A cla.s.sic way we sense feedback as drivers is through the size of the vehicle we are driving. The feedback is felt in various ways, from our closeness to the ground to the amount of road noise. Studies have suggested that drivers of small cars take fewer risks (as judged by speed, distance to the vehicle ahead of them, and seat-belt wearing) than drivers of larger cars. Many drivers, particularly in the United States, drive sportutility vehicles for their perceived safety benefits from increased weight and visibility. There is evidence, however, that SUV drivers trade these advantages for more aggressive driving behavior. The result, studies have argued, is that SUVs are, overall, no safer than medium or large pa.s.senger cars, and less safe than minivans.

Studies have also shown that SUV drivers drive faster, which may be a result of feeling safer. They seem to behave differently in other ways as well. A study in New Zealand observed the position of pa.s.sing drivers' hands on their steering wheels. This positioning has been suggested as a measure of perceived risk-research has found, for instance, that more people are likely to have their hands on the top half of the steering wheel when they're driving on roads with higher speeds and more lanes. The study found that SUV drivers, more than car drivers, tended to drive either with only one hand or with both hands on the bottom half of the steering wheel, positions that seemed to indicate lower feelings of risk. Another study looked at several locations in London. After observing more than forty thousand vehicles, researchers found that SUV drivers were more likely to be talking on a cell phone than car drivers, more likely not to be wearing a seat belt, and-no surprise-more likely not to be wearing a seat belt while while talking on a cell phone. talking on a cell phone.

It could just be that the types of people who talk on cell phones and disdain seat belts while driving also like to drive SUVs. But do they like to drive an SUV because they think it's a safer vehicle or because it gives them license to act more adventurously on the road? To return to the mythical Fred, pickup drivers are less likely than other drivers to wear their seat belts. Under risk-compensation theory, he is doing this because he feels safer in the large pickup truck. But could he not drive in an even more risky fashion yet lower the "cost" of that risky driving by buckling up? It all leads to questions of where we get our information about what is risky and safe, and how we act upon it. Since relatively few of us have firsthand experience with severe crashes in which the air bags deployed, can we really have an accurate sense of how safe we are in a car with air bags versus one without-enough to get us to change our behavior?

Risk is never as simple as it seems. One might think the safest course of action on the road would be to drive the newest car possible, one filled with the latest safety improvements and stuffed full of technological wonders. This car must be safer than your previous model. But, as a study in Norway found, new cars crash most. new cars crash most. It's not simply that there are more new cars on the road-the It's not simply that there are more new cars on the road-the rate rate is higher. After studying the records of more than two hundred thousand cars, the researchers concluded: "If you drive a newer car, the probability of both damage and injury is higher than if you drive an older car." is higher. After studying the records of more than two hundred thousand cars, the researchers concluded: "If you drive a newer car, the probability of both damage and injury is higher than if you drive an older car."

Given that a newer car would seem to offer more protection in a crash, the researchers suggested that the most likely explanation was drivers changing the way they drive in response to the new car. "When using an older car which may not feel very safe," they argued, "a driver probably drives more slowly and is more concentrated and cautious, possibly keeping a greater distance to the car in front." The finding that new cars crash most has shown up elsewhere, including in the United States, although another explanation has been offered: When people buy new cars, they drive them more than old cars. This in itself, however, may be a subtle form of risk compensation: I feel safer in my new car, thus I am going to drive it more often.

Studying risk is not rocket science; it's more complicated. Cars keep getting objectively safer, but the challenge is to design a car that can overcome the inherent risks of human nature.

In most places in the world, there are more suicides than homicides. Globally, more people take their own lives in an average year-roughly a million-than the total murdered and and killed in war. We always find these sorts of statistics surprising, even if we are simultaneously aware of one of the major reasons for our misconception: Homicides and war receive much more media coverage than suicides, so they seem more prevalent. killed in war. We always find these sorts of statistics surprising, even if we are simultaneously aware of one of the major reasons for our misconception: Homicides and war receive much more media coverage than suicides, so they seem more prevalent.

A similar bias helps explain why, in countries like the United States, the annual death toll from car crashes does not elicit more attention. If the media can be taken as some version of the authentic voice of public concern, one might a.s.sume that, over the last few years, the biggest threat to life in this country is terrorism. This is reinforced all the time. We hear constant talk about "suspicious packages" left in public buildings. We're searched at airports and we watch other people being searched. We live under coded warnings from the Department of Homeland Security. The occasional terrorist cell is broken up, even if it often seems to be a hapless group of wannabes.

Grimly tally the number of people who have been killed by terrorism in the United States since the State Department began keeping records in the 1960s, and you'll get a total of less than 5,000-roughly the same number, it has been pointed out, as those who have been struck by lightning. But each year, with some fluctuation, the number of people killed in car crashes in the United States tops 40,000. More people are killed on the roads each month than were killed in the September 11 attacks. In the wake of those attacks, polls found that many citizens thought it was acceptable to curtail civil liberties to help counter the threat of terrorism, to help preserve our "way of life." Those same citizens, meanwhile, in polls and in personal behavior, have routinely resisted traffic measures designed to reduce the annual death toll (e.g., lowering speed limits, introducing more red-light cameras, stiffer blood alcohol limits, stricter cell phone laws).

Ironically, the normal business of life that we are so dedicated to preserving is actually more dangerous to the average person than the threats against it. Road deaths in the three months after 9/11, for example, were 9 percent higher than those during the similar periods in the two years before. Given that airline pa.s.senger numbers dropped during this same period, it can be a.s.sumed some people chose to drive rather than fly. It might be precisely because of all the vigilance that no further deaths due to terrorism have occurred in the United States since 9/11-even as more than two hundred thousand people have died on the roads. This raises the question of why we do not mount a similarly concerted effort to improve the "security" of the nation's roads; instead, in the wake of 9/11, newspapers have been filled with stories of traffic police being taken off the roads and a.s.signed to counterterrorism.

In the 1990s, the United Kingdom dropped its road fatalities by 34 percent. The United States managed a 6.5 percent reduction. Why the difference? Better air bags, safer cars? It was mostly speed, one study concluded (although U.S. drivers also rack up many more miles each year). While the United Kingdom was introducing speed cameras, the United States was resisting cameras and raising speed limits. Had the United States pulled off what the United Kingdom did, it is suggested, 10,000 fewer people would have been killed.

Why doesn't the annual road death toll elicit the proportionate amount of concern? One reason may simply be the trouble we have in making sense of large numbers, because of what has been called "psychophysical numbing." Studies have shown that people think it's more important to save the same number of lives in a small refugee camp than a large refugee camp: Saving ten lives in a fifty-person camp seems more desirable than saving ten lives in a two-hundred-person camp, even though ten lives is ten lives. We seem less sensitive to changes when the numbers are larger.

By contrast, in what is called the "identifiable victim effect," we can be quite sensitive to the suffering of one person, like the victim of a terrible disease. We are, in fact, so sensitive to the suffering of one person that, as work by the American psychologist and risk-a.n.a.lysis expert Paul Slovic has shown, people are more likely to give more money to charity campaigns that feature one child rather than those that show multiple children-even when the appeal features only one one more child. more child.

Numbers, rather than commanding more attention for a problem, just seem to push us toward paralysis. (Perhaps this goes back to that evolutionary small-group hypothesis.) Traffic deaths present a further problem: Whereas a person in jeopardy can possibly be saved, we cannot know with certainty ahead of time who will be a crash victim-even most legally drunk drivers, after all, make it home safely. In fatal crashes, victims usually die instantly, out of sight. Their deaths are dispersed in s.p.a.ce and time, with no regular acc.u.mulated reporting of all who died. There are no vigils or pledge drives for fatal car-crash victims, just eulogies, condolences, and thoughts about how "it can happen to anyone," even if fatal car crashes are not as statistically random as we might think.

Psychologists have argued that our fears tend to be amplified by "dread" and "novelty." A bioterrorism attack is a new threat that we dread because it seems beyond our control. People have been dying in cars, on the other hand, for more than a century, often by factors presumably within their control. We also seem to think things are somehow less risky when we can feel a personal benefit they provide (like cars) than when we cannot (like nuclear power). Still, even within the realm of traffic, risks seem to be misperceived. Take so-called road rage. The number of people shot and killed on the road every year, even in gun-happy America, unofficially numbers around a dozen (far fewer than those killed by lightning). Fatigue, meanwhile, contributes to some 12 percent of crashes. We are better advised to watch out for yawning drivers than pistol-packing drivers.

Our feelings about which risks we should fear, as the English risk expert John Adams argues, are colored by several important factors. Is something voluntary or not? Do we feel that something is in our control or beyond our control? What is the potential reward? Some risks are voluntary, in our control (we think), and there is a reward. "A pure self-imposed, self-controlled voluntary risk might be something like rock climbing," Adams said. "The risk is the reward." No one forces a rock climber to take risks, and when rock climbers die, no one else feels threatened. (The same might be said of suicide versus murder.) Other risks are voluntary but we cede control-for example, taking a cross-country bus trip. We have no sway over the situation. Imagine that you are at the bus station and see a driver drinking a beer at the bar. Then imagine you see the same driver at the wheel as you board your bus. How would you feel? Nervous, I would guess.

Now imagine yourself at a bar having a beer. Then imagine yourself getting in your car to drive home. Did you envision the same dread and panic? Probably not, because you were, at least in your own mind, in control. You're the manager of your own risk. This is why people think they have a better chance of winning the lottery if they pick the numbers (it is also, admittedly, more fun that way). We get nervous about ceding control over risk to other people. Not surprisingly, we tend to inflate risk most dramatically for things that are involuntary, out of our control, and offer no reward. "The July 7 bombings here in London killed six days' worth of death on the road," Adams said. "After this event, ten thousand people gathered in Trafalgar Square. You don't get ten thousand people in Trafalgar Square lamenting last week's road death toll."

Why is is there no outrage? Driving is voluntary, it's in our control, and there's a reward. And so we fail to recognize the real danger cars present. Research in the United States has shown, for example, that exurban areas-the sprawling regions beyond the old inner-ring suburbs-pose greater risks to their inhabitants than central cities as a whole. This despite a cultural preconception that the opposite is true. The key culprit? Traffic fatalities. The less dense the environment, the more dangerous it is. If we wanted dramatically safer roads overnight-virtually fatality-free-it wouldn't actually be difficult. We could simply lower the speed limit to ten miles per hour (as in those Dutch there no outrage? Driving is voluntary, it's in our control, and there's a reward. And so we fail to recognize the real danger cars present. Research in the United States has shown, for example, that exurban areas-the sprawling regions beyond the old inner-ring suburbs-pose greater risks to their inhabitants than central cities as a whole. This despite a cultural preconception that the opposite is true. The key culprit? Traffic fatalities. The less dense the environment, the more dangerous it is. If we wanted dramatically safer roads overnight-virtually fatality-free-it wouldn't actually be difficult. We could simply lower the speed limit to ten miles per hour (as in those Dutch woonerven woonerven). Does that seem absurd? In the early 1900s that was was the speed limit. In Bermuda, very few people die in cars each year. The island-wide speed limit is 35 kilometers per hour (roughly 22 miles per hour). In the United States, to take one example, Sanibel Island, Florida, which like Bermuda has a 35 mph maximum, has not seen a traffic fatality this century, despite a heavy volume of cars and cyclists. But merely lowering mean speeds as little as one mile per hour, as Australian researchers have found, lowers crash risks. the speed limit. In Bermuda, very few people die in cars each year. The island-wide speed limit is 35 kilometers per hour (roughly 22 miles per hour). In the United States, to take one example, Sanibel Island, Florida, which like Bermuda has a 35 mph maximum, has not seen a traffic fatality this century, despite a heavy volume of cars and cyclists. But merely lowering mean speeds as little as one mile per hour, as Australian researchers have found, lowers crash risks.

As societies, we have gradually accepted faster and faster speeds as a necessary part of a life of increasing distances, what Adams calls "hypermobility." Higher speeds enable life to be lived at a scale in which time is more important than distance. Ask someone what their commute is, and they will inevitably give an answer in minutes, as if they were driving across a clock face. Our cars have been engineered to bring a certain level of safety to these speeds, but even this is rather arbitrary, for what is safe about an activity that kills tens of thousands of people a year and seriously injures many more than that? We drive with a certain air of invincibility, even though air bags and seat belts will not save us in roughly half the crashes we might get into, and despite the fact that, as Australian crash researcher Michael Paine has pointed out, half of all traffic fatalities to seat-belt-wearing drivers in frontal collisions happen at impact speeds at or below the seemingly slow level of 35 miles per hour.

We have deemed the rewards of mobility worth the risk. The fact that we're at the wheel skews our view. Not only do we think we're better than the average driver-that "optimistic bias" again-but studies show that we think we're less likely than the average driver to be involved in a crash. The feeling of control lowers our sense of risk. What's beyond our control comes to seem riskier, even though it is "human factors," not malfunctioning vehicles, faulty roads, or the weather, that are responsible for an estimated 90 percent of crashes.

On the road, we make our judgments about what's risky and what's safe using our own imperfect human calculus. We think large trucks are dangerous, but then we drive unsafely around them. We think roundabouts are more dangerous than intersections, although they're more safe. We think the sidewalk is a safer place to ride a bike, even though it's not. We worry about getting into a crash on "dangerous" holiday weekends but stop worrying during the week. We do not let children walk to school even though driving in a car presents a greater hazard. We use hands-free cell phones to avoid risky dialing and then spend more time on risky calls (among other things). We carefully stop at red lights when there are no other cars, but exceed the speed limit during the rest of the trip. We buy SUVs because we think they're safer and then drive them in more dangerous ways. We drive at a minuscule following distance to the car ahead, exceeding our ability to avoid a crash, with a blind faith that the driver ahead will never have a reason to suddenly stop. We have gotten to the point where cars are safer than ever, yet traffic fatalities cling to stubbornly high levels. We know all this, and act as if we don't.

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Driving Lessons Before embarking on this book, I hadn't thought much about driving since first learning to do it and acquiring my license on the, ahem, second try. Since then, I've logged a few hundred thousand miles or so, had several minor crashes ("accidents" if you must, though both were easily my fault, because of careless behavior whose specifics shall be withheld), and dropped by to the Department of Motor Vehicles every decade or so to glance at an eye chart and get renewed by a grumpy clerk. I mostly just got behind the wheel, fussed over the radio, and hit the road with a mixture of anxiety and wonder: anxiety over the danger of it all, the crumpled cars on the roadside, the shockingly poor behavior, the nervous way people say, "Drive safely" as you leave them; and a simultaneous sense of wonder that we're all able to move about at high speeds, in such great numbers, with such fluidity.

After spending a long time sifting through the theories and science of traffic, I wondered if there was not still more to be learned about driving a car. I thought, Why not go to those people who, for sport and for a living, drive cars at the absolute limits, in conditions that make even the most frantic traffic seem sedentary? What could race-car drivers have to teach civilians about driving? And so one morning I found myself hunched into one of those small chairs with an attached desk, part of a group including gum-chewing teens and graying sixtysomethings, in a brightly lit cla.s.sroom at the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving, just south of Phoenix. At the front of the cla.s.s stood Les Betchner, jauntily tanned and with spiky blond hair, a sometime stock-car racer who exuded the easy patter and ridiculously innate competence that just seems the birthright of people like airline pilots and sports instructors.

Drivers, as you well know by now, tend to self-enhance. We are thin-skinned about our sense of driving competence. One is loath to admit, at age forty, that there are new things to be learned. And yet this is just what was happening. "A steering wheel doesn't do much," Betchner was saying. "You steer with the pedals." What? What? I snapped to attention. Steer with the pedals? He was PowerPointing his way through the problems of skidding around corners. Racers loathe skidding, not because it means they are out of control but because they are, as they say, "scrubbing speed." "We never want to slide," Betchner said. "That's the slow way around the track." I snapped to attention. Steer with the pedals? He was PowerPointing his way through the problems of skidding around corners. Racers loathe skidding, not because it means they are out of control but because they are, as they say, "scrubbing speed." "We never want to slide," Betchner said. "That's the slow way around the track."

As you may recall from your driving lessons, there are two kinds of corner skids, an "understeer skid" and an "oversteer skid." On the race track they say an understeer skid means it's your front end that's smacking the guardrail, while in an oversteer skid your rear end hits first. Despite the word steer, steer, steering is only part of knowing how to react to and correct for under- or oversteer situations. It can often hurt more than help. "Add a bunch of steering, you go right off the road," Betchner said. "Physics is now part of your life." steering is only part of knowing how to react to and correct for under- or oversteer situations. It can often hurt more than help. "Add a bunch of steering, you go right off the road," Betchner said. "Physics is now part of your life."

The real key to skid control, he explained, is "weight transfer." In an understeer skid, the car's front wheels have lost traction. Attempting to steer will only make matters worse. Braking shifts weight to the front and adds grip. In an oversteer skid, meanwhile, the rear of the car has lost traction and wants to pa.s.s the front. The slip angle, or the difference between the direction the tires are pointed and the direction they are actually moving, is greater in the rear tires than the front. The first step in taming the rear wheels is, essentially, taking the turn more widely. So instead of moving the steering wheel in the direction of the turn, increasing the slip angle, you must "steer into the skid"-move the steering wheel in the direction the rear of the car is moving. Many of us know what "steer into the skid" means without really knowing what it means. The larger problem, Betchner pointed out, is that no one is ever taught what to do next. He queried the room. There were some half-mumbled answers. No two seemed to be the same. "Pray?" someone joked.

The answer is the opposite of what you might expect: Hit the gas. "When in doubt, flat out," instructed Betchner. (Actually, he added, you want to add just a touch of throttle input.) The natural instinct, of course, is to hit the brakes. The problem is that this shifts weight to the front end of the car-exactly where you don't want it to be. As your car dips toward the front end, you're helping your rear wheels lose their already tenuous grip on the road. They need every ounce of pressure they can get. Then there is the final problem. You can't just keep steering into a skid. "That's where we find ourselves getting into trouble," said Mike McGovern, another longtime Bondurant instructor. "We do that first part well, but when the car hooks up and comes back to straight, we hold the steering. We don't unwind it. We're telling the car to turn again, and that's when you get into a secondary skid." This is another somewhat counterintuitive lesson: To fully rea.s.sert control, you need to relinquish the steering, letting the pull of the realigned tires do the work as the steering wheel spins through your hands.

Another lesson that seemed rather obvious-but proved curiously powerful once tried out on the test track-was the Bondurant mantra "Look where you want to go." This recalls the "moth effect" phenomenon and brings up a chicken-and-egg sort of problem that vision researchers still debate: Do we automatically travel in the direction we are looking, or do we first search for a target destination and then keep looking in that direction to maintain our course? Do we drive where we look or look where we drive? The former, arguably: As one study found, "there is a systematic and reliable tendency for [drivers] to follow their direction of gaze with their direction of travel, in many cases without the conscious awareness of doing so at all."

This might seem rather academic and of little concern to you, but consider what happens when a car suddenly pulls out in front of you as you're speeding down a rural road. If you "target fixate," as the Bondurant instructors call it-that is, look at the car that pulled out instead of where you need to be to evade the crash-do you have less chance of avoiding the accident? Does your "gaze eccentricity," as vision people call it, negatively affect your ability to steer away from the obstacle?

The science is still inconclusive, but on the Bondurant "skid pad" the effectiveness of the racer's maxim "Look where you want to go" was made strikingly clear. I was driving a Pontiac Grand Prix equipped with outrigger wheels attached to the back end. At the flick of a switch, the instructor could raise the car to simulate a skid at much faster speeds. As I repeatedly drove in loops and practiced getting out of oversteer skids, I found I corrected more easily by concentrating not on the giant barrier of rubber tires I was sliding toward (admittedly not an easy thing to ignore) but on that place around the corner where I wanted to be.

It would be easy to dismiss the school, with its fleets of Corvettes, its acrid tang of burned rubber and exhaust, its looping Grand Prixstyle track, as a playground for the unhinged libidinal fantasies of people normally shackled by the world of everyday driving. Indeed, there was a heavy midlife-crisis vibe about the place. And yet there were myriad moments where I thought to myself, Why didn't I know this before?

"Driver's ed taught you how to get a license," Bob Bondurant told me in his office, his ever-present dog Rusty, a Queensland heeler, panting nearby. "It didn't teach you skid control or evasive emergency maneuvers." In 1967, Bondurant's promising racing career was cut short when the steering arm on his McLaren Mk II broke at 150 miles per hour, propelling him into an embankment that sent his car "as high as a telephone pole." Since then, he has been teaching people like Clint Eastwood and James Garner how to handle a car. This is not how most of us learn, of course. "The driver-ed guy might be your English teacher," Bondurant said. He or she knows as much about driving, he implied, as the average person. And mostly, this is fine. fine. Despite the prediction from Karl Benz, the founder of the Mercedes-Benz company, that the global car market would be limited because only a relative few would possess the skills needed to drive, most of us, as Bondurant said, "just plunk our b.u.t.t down in the seat and drive down the road." Despite the prediction from Karl Benz, the founder of the Mercedes-Benz company, that the global car market would be limited because only a relative few would possess the skills needed to drive, most of us, as Bondurant said, "just plunk our b.u.t.t down in the seat and drive down the road."

Indeed, there is a strong argument against the idea that we should emulate the actions of people like race-car drivers in everyday life. In a well-known (but not since repeated) study conducted in the 1970s, researchers from the Insurance Inst.i.tute for Highway Safety looked into the off-course driving records of a pool of stock-car drivers. These drivers were no doubt capable of handling themselves around tight turns, no doubt superior at antic.i.p.ating their moves ahead of time, no doubt possessed faster reaction times than ordinary people. How had they actually performed on the road, off the track? They'd not only gotten more traffic tickets (which we would expect given their penchant for risk) but they'd also had more crashes than the average driver. Racers possess superior control of a car, to be sure, but control alone does not win races. They also need that ineffable something within that tells them to push just slightly beyond their limits, and the limits of every other driver, to win. As Mario Andretti put it, "If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough." They had, one might argue, put themselves into positions in which their skills were not always enough to keep them out of trouble.

In everyday traffic, "good driving" has little to do with cornering ability or navigating between tight packs of high-speed vehicles. It's more a matter of just following the rules, staying awake, and not hitting anyone. This is not to say that racing cannot teach us things about everyday driving. Racers, Betchner said, sit erect and close, alert for feedback signals that can be felt in the pedals and steering wheel. The typical driver's posture, however, is terrible. "Most of us sit back, the 'Detroit lean,'" he said. "The car communication is horrible." Some drivers, he lamented, sit so far back they cannot reliably depress the brake pedal far enough to activate the antilock system. Or consider vision, the sense that is supposed to account for 90 percent of our driving activity. The racer's dictum that you should always be looking ahead to where you want to go next, which helps them speed through turns, is just as apt for something as prosaic as navigating an intersection. One reason for the high numbers of pedestrians struck in the crosswalk by vehicles turning is that drivers are simply not looking in the right place; they may be concentrating on making the corner itself as they turn (particularly if they are on a cell phone or otherwise distracted), rather than on what the result of their turn will be. In racing, this slows you down. In real life, it means you might hit someone.

Everyday driving also presents those moments for which nothing in our previous experience can have adequately prepared us: the oncoming car crossing the line, the sudden obstacle in the headlights. At Bondurant, I went through repeated drills-for instance, driving a car as fast as I could toward a set of cones, hitting the brakes hard enough to activate the antilock system (something that actually took me several tries), and then steering off into a small lane marked by different cones. I was struck by just how much control of the vehicle I had under full braking. The ABS did not help me stop any more quickly; indeed, another exercise, one that involved steering into one of three lanes at the last moment at the command of a signal, drummed home the idea that certain crashes, inevitable if I had braked, could be rather easily avoided by simply steering. It did, however, open my eyes to the ability one has, with ABS, to stop and and steer at the same time. steer at the same time.

That may seem, like the other lessons at Bondurant, rather common knowledge, but the wealth of evidence derived from studies of what drivers actually do in the critical moments of emergency situations suggests otherwise. First, drivers are actually quite reluctant to steer when an obstacle suddenly looms in front of them. The majority of drivers brake first and steer last, if at all, even in tests where steering is physically the only way to avoid a crash. This may be because steering might seem to put the driver in an even more precarious position, or it may be because the driver is unaware of the way the car is capable of handling, or it may simply be a form of "operant conditioning"-pressing our brakes, like staying in our lane, has so often been the right thing to do in everyday driving, it begins to seem the only thing to do. But research has also shown that drivers rarely activate the brakes to their full power. Other studies have demonstrated that when steering is attempted, the maneuver tends to be in the same direction the obstacle is moving, which hints that drivers are not "looking where they want to go" (and moving in that direction) but are focused instead on the obstacle to be avoided.

Whether or not the "muscle memory" of my evasive actions on the test course can be sustained over years of uneventful driving is an open question. The major problem is that so many things can go wrong in traffic that it would be impossible to teach, much less remember, appropriate responses for each scenario. Add to this the problem that because these events are unexpected, our reaction times are slowed; the emotional duress of a potential crash might even further slow our reactions-sometimes, studies have shown, to the point where we do nothing.

Then there is the shifting, dynamic nature of traffic itself. It is sometimes impossible to say what a "correct" evasive maneuver would be in the moment of trying to avoid another driver, as it could be canceled out by an unexpected countermove by that other driver. In one trial, forty-nine drivers were put in a driving simulator at Daimler-Benz. As they approached an intersection, a car that had been stopped on the crossroad suddenly accelerated into the intersection, then halted in the drivers' lane. The reaction time of every driver was sufficient, in theory, to avoid a crash. But only ten of forty-nine did. Part of the problem is that they had only time enough to react to the presence of the approaching car, and not enough time to fully discern what the intruding car was going to do. It was less about a correct maneuver than a roll of the dice.

Whether advanced driver training helps drivers in the long term is one of those controversial and unresolved mysteries of the road, but my eye-opening experience at Bondurant raises the curious idea that we buy cars-for most people one of the most costly things they will ever own-with an underdeveloped sense of how to use them. This is true for many things, arguably, but not knowing what the F9 key does in Microsoft Word is less life-threatening than not knowing how to properly operate antilock brakes.

This uneasy idea is one of the many unresolved tensions and contradictions found in driving and the traffic it sp.a.w.ns. There is the contradiction of the car itself: With its DNA steeped in racing, today it's often just part of a loosely organized, greatly inefficient ma.s.s-transit system, a "living room on wheels." To drive safely is often to become rather bored, which may lead us to become distracted and thus less safe. On the other hand, if we drove like racers, we would have little problem becoming distracted or falling asleep, but we would inherently be driving less safely. (Even the most skilled drivers cannot overcome the fundamental physics of things like stopping distance.) We all think we're better than the average driver. We think cars are the risk when on foot; we think pedestrians act dangerously when we're behind the wheel. We want safer cars so we can drive more dangerously. Driving, with its exhilarating speed and the boundless personal mobility it grants us, is strangely life-affirming but also, for most of us, the most deadly presence in our lives. We all want to be individuals on the road, but smooth-flowing traffic requires conformity. We want all the lights to be green, unless we are on the intersecting road, in which case we want those those lights to be green. We want little traffic on our own street but a convenient ten-lane highway blazing just nearby. We all wish the other person would not drive, so that our trip would be faster. What's best for us on the road is often not best for everyone else, and vice versa. lights to be green. We want little traffic on our own street but a convenient ten-lane highway blazing just nearby. We all wish the other person would not drive, so that our trip would be faster. What's best for us on the road is often not best for everyone else, and vice versa.

The reason I have avoided talking about the negative environmental consequences of the car is that I believe, as was once said, that it will be easier to remove the internal-combustion engine from the car than it will to remove the driver. With fuel economy liberated by some renewable, sustainable fuel source of the future, all the dynamics of traffic I have described will only become more amplified. As Larry Burns, vice president of R&D and strategic planning at General Motors, put it to me, "Of all the externalities of an auto that I worry about-energy, environment, equality of access, safety, and congestion-the one that I think is toughest to solve is congestion."

Even if the driver is still in the car, whether he or she will be driving in the future is another question. Virtually all of the perceptual limitations we have in driving-blind spots, overdriving our headlights, problems in detecting the rate of closure-are being addressed by scientists and car manufacturers. High-end cars already bristle with these features. An ad for BMW's xDrive system, which "uses sensors to monitor the road ahead," puts it succinctly. It says, "xDrive reaction time: 100 milliseconds. Human reaction time: unnecessary." Technologies like "gaze detection," in which the car will tell the driver that he or she is not paying attention (by tracking eye movements), are on the horizon.

The future of driving will probably look a lot less like the track at Bondurant and much more like the 200,000-square-foot parking lot at AT&T Park (ordinarily home of the San Francisco Giants) during the World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems. The parking lot had been converted into a "Innovative Mobility Showcase" for any number of high-tech traffic devices. It looked like a kind of strange carnival of human limitations. There were "Intelligent Intersections" that could alert drivers when an approaching driver did not seem, as calculated by sensors and algorithms, intent on stopping and "Dynamic Parking" demonstrations that promised to end, through real-time sensors, the search for open parking spots.

I was riding in a Cadillac CTS with C. Christopher Kellum and Priyantha Mudalige, two researchers with General Motors. The car, via GPS technology and receivers, was communicating with the other cars, also equipped with the technology. GM calls its technology "vehicle to vehicle," and the idea is that by connecting all the cars in a kind of mobile network, this shared intelligence can help you "watch for the other guy," as Mudalige put it. A screen displayed the fact that we were connected to two other vehicles. The researchers are aware that any system released into the real world would have to contend with hundreds more at a time. "We do lots of simulations to understand what happens when there's two thousand vehicles in the same spot," said Kellum. "We need an intelligent way to pa.r.s.e out what information is important and what's not important. If there's an accident a mile ahead, you want that information. If it's just some guy driving a mile ahead, you don't really care."

If this sounds familiar, it's because it is: This kind of incident detection and evaluation was one of the key tasks the Stanford team had targeted in getting their robotic car Junior to drive successfully in simulated urban traffic. I was, I realized, sitting in Junior's cousin. Kellum asked me to change lanes, even though I knew, in this case, that a neighboring car had crept into my blind spot. As I put the signal on, I felt a small, Magic Fingersstyle vibration in my back. This is known as a haptic warning, and it is used so that the driver will not be overwhelmed with visual or auditory information, or to underscore warnings he or she might disregard. (As you will feel when your car has drifted off the road into gravel, haptic warnings can be crudely effective.) One of the issues that haunts driver-a.s.sist technologies like "lane-departure warnings" is that these warnings can become ever more prescient, ever more sophisticated, but drivers still have to pay attention to the warning and be able to react accordingly.

Or perhaps not. Next, Kellum asked me to drive at a steady clip toward a parked car far in the distance. "Whatever feels comfortable," he said. He then asked me not to press the brakes. "We're going to go up there and our car's going to brake automatically," he said. "In real time we're constantly a.s.sessing how far away we are, the closing speeds, and when to start braking. I've done this at seventy-five miles per hour." This was essentially the same exercise as at Bondurant, but instead of being asked to lock up the ABS, I was being asked to sit back and do nothing. I was in Junior, and I was riding shotgun. The stopped car quickly loomed into view. Time seemed to slow for a moment. (In reality, as studies have suggested, it probably sped up and this was just my memory playing tricks.) A chill shot through my body; the hairs on my neck tingled. Images of blooming air bags and the buckling necks of crash-test dummies ran through my head like a fleeting nightmare. The car came to a perfect stop.

Somewhere down the road, in some distant future, humans may evolve to become perfect drivers, with highly adapted vision and reflexes for moving seamlessly at high speeds. Perhaps, like the ants, we will turn the highways into blissfully cooperative, ultraefficient streams of movement, with no merging or tailgating or finger flipping. Long before that happens, however, a sooner future seems likely: cars driving themselves, at smoothly synchronized speeds to ensure maximum traffic flow and safe following distances, equipped with merging algorithms set for highest throughput, all overseen by network routers that guide cars down the most efficient paths on these information superhighways. Maybe this will be the traffic nirvana for which we have been searching. We would do well, though, to remember the warning from the mid-twentieth-century traffic engineer Henry Barnes: "As time goes on the technical problems become more automatic, while the people problems become more surrealistic." Even if drivers are taken away from the wheel, can we ever take the mere fact of being human out of traffic?

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Despite possessing the small diploma known as a driver's license, I was, throughout the course of this endeavor, a novice in a complex field. I relied on the help of many people in many places, without whom this book would have been impossible.

In no logical order, then, and with any omissions purely unintended, allow me to unravel the roster of grat.i.tude, beginning geographically with the American Middle West. At the University of Iowa and at its National Advanced Driving Simulator, Daniel McGehee, John Lee, Omar Ahmad, and Tara Smyser patiently explained their findings and looked the other way as I skidded out of control in Virtual Iowa on the world's most advanced driving simulator. At the University of Michigan, Michael Flannagan and Daniel Blower at the Transportation Research Inst.i.tute, and Barry Kantowitz in the Department of Engineering, walked me through ergonomics, vision, and other topics. Over in Warren, Michigan, and in Detroit, Richard A. Young, Larry Burns, and Linda S. Angell of General Motors popped open the hood on the automaker's research. In Chicago, Howard Hayes and Larry Peterson of Navteq walked me through the company's traffic monitoring operations, while Jean Gornicki took me on a Navteq mapping drive of the suburbs. At the University of North Dakota, Mark Nawrot taught me Motion Parallax 101, among other things.

In Los Angeles, special thanks are due to John E. Fisher, a.s.sistant General Manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, and Frank Quon, Deputy District Director of Operations for District 7, for sharing their extensive knowledge and insight into how traffic in L.A. functions. Thanks also to Marco Ruano, Dawn Helou, Afsaneh M. Razavi, and Jeanne Bonfilio of Caltrans, and James Okazaki, Kartik Patel, and Verej Janoyan of LA DOT. Thanks to Chris Hughes, Claire Sigman, and Shane Novicki at Clear Channel's Airwatch in Orange County, as well as Vera Jimenez at CBS2 in Los Angeles, for dishing on L.A. traffic in all its infinite varieties. Sergeant Joseph Zizi of the California Highway Patrol gave me an intimate view into patroling the highway and answered any number of statistical queries. At UCLA, a number of people across different departments shared their expertise: Donald Shoup, Jay Phelan, Brian D. Taylor, Randall Crane, and Jack Katz. At Stanford University, thanks to Sebastian Thrun and Michael Montemerlo.

In the New York region, thanks are due to Kay Sarlin, Ryan Russo, and Michael Primeggia of the New York City Department of Transportation. Sam "Gridlock Sam" Schwartz of Sam Schwartz PLLC and Michael King at Nelson/Nygaard provided invaluable insight and commentary on New York traffic. Aaron Naparstek was a constant source of traffic inspiration, and under his editorship, streetsblog.org remains the world's single best source of transportation news and opinion. At the New Jersey Department of Transportation in Trenton, Gary Toth and Yosry Bekhiet gave me a tour of the city's highway overhaul and patiently explained "Jersey jughandles" and other exotic traffic creatures of the Garden State (where this book began). In the Washington, D.C.Beltway area, special thanks to Nancy McGuckin and Alan Pisarski; and, at the Federal Highway Administration, thanks to Tom Granda, Carl Anderson, Doug Hec.o.x, John McCracken, Michael Trentacoste, Bill Prosser, and Ray Krammes for the tour of the Turner-Fairbank Lab, the lively roundtable discussion, and subsequent conversations. At the National Highway Safety Administration, thanks to Charles Kahane and Patricia Ellison-Potter. remains the world's single best source of transportation news and opinion. At the New Jersey Department of Transportation in Trenton, Gary Toth and Yosry Bekhiet gave me a tour of the city's highway overhaul and patiently explained "Jersey jughandles" and other exotic traffic creatures of the Garden State (where this book began). In the Washington, D.C.Beltway area, special thanks to Nancy McGuckin and Alan Pisarski; and, at the Federal Highway Administration, thanks to Tom Granda, Carl Anderson, Doug Hec.o.x, John McCracken, Michael Trentacoste, Bill Prosser, and Ray Krammes for the tour of the Turner-Fairbank Lab, the lively roundtable discussion, and subsequent conversations. At the National Highway Safety Administration, thanks to Charles Kahane and Patricia Ellison-Potter.

In Canada, Gerry Wilde offered his theories on risk homeostasis (and top-drawer espresso). Baher Abdulhai, founder and head of the Intelligent Transportation Systems Centre and Testbed at the University of Toronto, explained the "fundamental diagrams" and other traffic intricacies to me. In Mexico City, Mario Gonzalez-Roman took me driving on the monumental Segundo Piso and helped in countless other ways. Thanks also to Agustin Barrios Gomez and Alan Skinner. Alfredo Hernandez Garcia, executive director of traffic control and engineering at the Secretaria de Seguridad Publica of the Gobierno del Distrito Federal, opened up the city's Traffic Management Center in the Colonia Obrera. Thanks also to Claudia Adeath at Muevete por tu Ciudad, which deserves kudos for trying to calm Mexico City's often hostile traffic.

In England, thanks to Malcolm Murray-Clark, Director of Congestion Charging in London, and Phil Davis, at Transport for London's London Traffic Control Centre. Peter Weeden of the Royal Kensington Borough Council graciously offered his time and expertise. John Adams, professor emeritus at University College London, offered his always trenchant thoughts on risk. At the Transport Research Laboratory in Wokingham, Janet Kennedy shared her expertise and the lab's driving simulator. Thanks also to John Groeger at the University of Surrey, Jake Desyllas at Intelligent s.p.a.ce, and Bill Hillier and Alain Chiaradia at s.p.a.ce Syntax. In Germany, Michael Schreckenberg at the University of Duisburg-Essen's Physics of Transport and Traffic department held a wide-ranging and illuminating symposium for me on the personal and system-wide physics of traffic. At the Bundesanstalt fur Straenwesen (Federal Highway Research Unit) in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany, Karl-Josef Hohnscheid and Kerstin Lemke answered my questions about the autobahn and other topics. Thanks also to Juergen Berlitz at the ADAC (Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-Club). In Copenhagen, thanks are due to the esteemed traffic guru Jan Gehl, at Jan Gehl a.s.sociates; and Steffen Rasmussen, of the city's Traffic and Planning Office. In Italy, many thanks to Paolo Borgognone and Giuseppe Cesaro of the Automobile Club d'Italia for the traffic knowledge and the excellent cacio e pepe. cacio e pepe. Thanks also to Andrea del Martino at the Laboratory of Complex Systems at "La Sapienza," and Max Hall, physics teacher and Roman Vespa rider. Thanks also to Andrea del Martino at the Laboratory of Complex Systems at "La Sapienza," and Max Hall, physics teacher and Roman Vespa rider.

In Beijing, thanks to w.a.n.g Shuling, Xian Kai, and Zhang Dexin at the Beijing Transportation Research Center for explaining the evolving complexities of traffic in the capital. Thanks also to Professors Rong Jian and Chen Yanyan at the Beijing University of Technology, as well as Dehui Lee. Thanks also to Lui Shinan at the China Daily China Daily; and Scott Kronick, Jonathan Landreth, and Alex Pasternak. In Shanghai, thanks to Jian Shuo w.a.n.g, and Zhongyin Guo of Tongji University; thanks also to Dan Washburn for hospitality and advice. In j.a.pan, thanks to Paul Nolasco, Imai Tomomi, and James Corbett for arranging the tour of Toyota's Integrated System Engineering Division in Nagoya. In Hanoi, Vietnam, thanks to Walter Molt and Grieg Craft, who are, in their own different ways, trying to make the city's transportation better and safer. In Delhi, thanks to Maxwell Pereira; Geetam Tiwari and Dinesh Mohan at the Indian Inst.i.tute of Technology; and Joint Commissioner of Police Qamar Ahmed. Thanks also to Rohit Baluja, Girish Chandra Kukreti, and Amandeep Singh Bedi of the Inst.i.tute for Road Traffic Education.

Thanks must also go to a number of people, across the globe, who discussed their research, showed the way, corrected my mistakes. Again, in no order: Per Garder at the University of Maine; Eric Dumbaugh at Texas A&M University; Ezra Hauer, professor emeritus, University of Toronto; Walter Kulash, Dan Burden, and Ian Lockwood of Glatting Jackson in Orlando, Florida; Allan Williams and Kim Hazelbaker of the Insurers' Inst.i.tute for Highway Safety; Sheila "Charlie" Klauer and Suzie Lee of the Virginia Tech Transportation Inst.i.tute; Charles Zegeer at the Highway Safety Research Center; Erik Olson at the National Inst.i.tute of Child Health and Human Development; Del Lisk, Bruce Moeller, and Rusty Weiss of DriveCam in San Diego; Christopher Patten of the Swedish Road Administration; John Dawson at the European Road a.s.sessment Program; Tom Bernthal of Kelton Research; Sandi Rosenbloom at the University of Arizona; Tova Rosenbloom of Bar-Ilan University in Israel; Heikki Summala of the Traffic Research Unit at the University of Finland; Oliver Downs and Michele Large at INRIX; Hussein Dia at the University of Queensland Intelligent Transport Systems lab; Graham Coe at the Transport Research Laboratory; Nick Fenton at U.K Highways Agency; Robert Gray at Arizona State University; Norman Garrick at the University of Connecticut; James Cutting at Cornell University; Anna Hackett, Bob Bondurant, Les Betchner, and Mike McGovern at the Bondurant School of High Performance Driving; Judie Zimomra and Amanda Rutherford in Sanibel Island, Florida; Charles Spence at the University of Oxford; Eric Bonabeau at Icosystem; Antti Oulasvirta at the University of California, Berkeley; Stephen Lea at the University of Exeter; Denis Wood at the University of North Carolina; Eleanor Maguire at University College London; Dale Purves at Duke University; Michael Spivey at Cornell University; Kara k.o.c.kelman at the University of Texas; Moshe Ben-Akiva at the Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology; Gary Evans at Cornell University; John Kobza at Texas Tech University; Timothy McNamara at Vanderbilt University; John Van Horn at Parking Today Parking Today; Andrew Velkey at Christopher Newport University; Franco Servadei at Ospedale "M. b.u.t.talini," Cesena, Italy; Gary Davis at the University of Minnesota; Robert Cialdini at Arizona State University; Marc Ross at the University of Michigan; Nicholas Garber at the University of Virginia; Tom Wenzel at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Phil Jones of Phil Jones a.s.sociates in the United Kingdom; Jake Desyllas of Intelligent s.p.a.ce in London; Sidney Nagel and Lior Strahilevetz at the University of Chicago; Frank McKenna at the University of Reading; Geoff Underwood at the University of Nottingham; Daniel Lieberman at Harvard University; Stephen Popiel at Synovate; Asha Weinstein Agrawal at San Jose State University; Jeffrey Brown at Florida State University; Gordy Pehrson at the Office of Traffic Safety in St. Paul, Minnesota; David Levinson at the University of Minnesota; Charles Komanoff at Komanoff Energy a.s.sociates; Giuseppe La Torre at the Catholic University in Rome; Eric Poehler at the University of Virginia; Mark Horswill at the University of Queensland; Michael Paine at Vehicle Design and Research in Australia; Joseph Barton at Northwestern University; Anna Nagurney at the University of Ma.s.sachusetts; David Gerard and Paul Fischbeck at Carnegie Mellon University; Andy Wiley-Schwartz, then of the Project for Public s.p.a.ces; Craig Davis at the University of Michigan; Bruce Laval, formerly of Disney; and Richard Larson at the Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology.

A handful of people deserve even more emphatic thanks for going above and beyond in sharing their research, or reading drafts of chapters. Leonard Evans, the dean of traffic safety, was always there to offer his expertise. Jeffrey Muttart made time to talk on countless occasions and ran experiments on my behalf. Stephen Most at the University of Delaware and Daniel Simons at the University of Illinois read parts of the ma.n.u.script and offered useful commentary, as did Matthew Kitchen of the Puget Sound Regional Council. Benjamin Coifman at Ohio State University helped me through the complexities of traffic flow. Ian Walker at the University of Bath is a brilliant scholar and all-around mensch. Iain Couzin at Oxford and Princeton led me through the world of ant traffic. James Surowiecki and Matt Weiland read drafts and offered honest feedback. Peter Hall graciously chipped in with research help. Ben Hamilton-Baillie, impa.s.sioned "shared s.p.a.ce" advocate and wizard of the slide show, led me on an eye-opening tour through Germany and the Netherlands, where he generously introduced me to Joost Vahl, one of the seminal forces in traffic calming and engineering with a human face, and Hans Monderman, whose words and spirit pervade this book. My time spent with Hans, and subsequent conversations, revealed a man br.i.m.m.i.n.g with pa.s.sion, insight, sly wit, and a surprisingly capacious range of interests. Into his discussion of left-turn gap acceptance or roundabout capacity he would percolate ideas on how the geography of the Netherlands fostered Dutch innovation, or quote Proust on how the automobile changed our conception of time. Hans died on January 7, 2008, after a several-year fight with cancer. I only hope I can help Hans's legacy live on in these pages.

I am indebted to Andrew Miller at Alfred A. Knopf, who encouraged me early on when the book was nothing but the grain of an idea, and subsequently was a steadfast presence, offering judicious editorial counsel, moral support, and the occasional football result. Sara Sherbill at Knopf also contributed a number of good criticisms, most of which helped shape the final book. Bonnie Thompson corralled wayward grammar, exposed logical lacunae, and kept facts this side of veracity. Thanks to the Knopf publicity team, Paul Bogaards, Gabrielle Brooks, Erinn Hartman, Nicholas Latimer, and Jason Kincade. Will Goodlad at Penguin UK offered all of the above from across the Atlantic. Lastly, I am immensely obliged to my agent and longtime friend, Zoe Pagnamenta, at PFD New York. She has been a tireless and sagacious advocate for me and the book, and I never felt as if I were going it alone. I am also grateful to Simon Trewin at PFD in London.

And finally, this book is dedicated to my family, near and far, who were there from the beginning of the journey; especially my wife, Jancee Dunn, my beautiful, brilliant co-pa.s.senger in the car, and in life.

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Prologue: Why I Became a Late Merger in a business magazine: Matt Asay, "How Team Works." Connect, Connect, November 2003. Retrieved from November 2003. Retrieved from http://www.connect-utah.com/article.asp?r=189&iid=17&sid=4.

mingle so freely: There are exceptions to this, of course, as in the case of the ban on women drivers in Saudi Arabia (which extends even to golf carts) or the segregated highways in Israel for Palestinians and Israelis. See Brian Whitaker, "Saudi Driving Ban on Women Extends to Golf Carts," Guardian, Guardian, March 3, 2006, and Steven Erlanger, "A Segregated Road in an Already Driving Land," March 3, 2006, and Steven Erlanger, "A Segregated Road in an Already Driving Land," New York Times, New York Times, August 11, 2007. August 11, 2007.

people and things became interchangeable: Sean Dockray, Steve Rowell, and Fiona Whitton point out that while terms like computer computer and and typewriter typewriter used to refer to people (e.g., the profession of a typewriter), they now refer exclusively to the technologies themselves. We have become traffic, they argue, but we do not like to admit that in our language. See "Blocking All Lanes," used to refer to people (e.g., the profession of a typewriter), they now refer exclusively to the technologies themselves. We have become traffic, they argue, but we do not like to admit that in our language. See "Blocking All Lanes," Cabinet, Cabinet, no. 17 (Spring 2005). no. 17 (Spring 2005).

on certain streets altogether: See Eric Poehler, "The Circulation of Traffic in Pompeii's Regio VI," Journal of Roman Archaeology, Journal of Roman Archaeology, vol. 19 (2005), pp. 5374. vol. 19 (2005), pp. 5374.

no traffic or street signs: Poehler argues that given the level of preservation at Pompeii, had these signs existed there would likely be archeological evidence today. Drivers, he suggests, relied instead upon the cues of other drivers or design cues in the streetscape, while people looking for addresses relied more upon relative cues (e.g., turn left at the butcher shop or right at the shrine). Correspondence with Eric Poehler.

Vico di Mercurio: Poehler suggests that these changes must have been overseen by some kind of Department of Traffic Engineering. "The inescapable implication is that the traffic system was carefully managed by a central, executive individual or group at the munic.i.p.al level." See Eric Poehler, "A Reexamination of Traffic in Pompeii's Regio VI: The Casa del Fauno, the Central Baths, and the Reversal of Vico di Mercurio," Archaeological Inst.i.tute of America Archaeological Inst.i.tute of America (2005). (2005).

In ancient Rome: The Roman traffic history comes from The Roads of the Romans, The Roads of the Romans, by Romolo August Staccioli (Rome: L'Erma di Bretschneider, 2003), in particular pp. 2123. by Romolo August Staccioli (Rome: L'Erma di Bretschneider, 2003), in particular pp. 2123.

"a devil-fish from sleeping": quoted in ibid, p. 23.

"of the Mayor": The English traffic history comes from the wonderful book Street Life in Medieval England, Street Life in Medieval England, by G. T. Salusbury Jones (Oxford: Pen-in-Hand, 1939). by G. T. Salusbury Jones (Oxford: Pen-in-Hand, 1939).

"contesting for the way": The information on traffic fatalities and the accounts of London drivers are taken from Emily c.o.c.kayne's exemplary study Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 15780. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)