We are how we move

Considering all my life I have been told I notice small details that are usually of no effect and consequence, I assumed the same for all the things I notice while driving. And considering I have been driving since I was nine (one of the many perks of a small-town), I even formed theories, obviously silly to be discussed in a public forum, about all the things that happen while driving. Like while driving in one lane you see that it is blocked up ahead and you switch to the next one and it doesn’t move? While the one you were originally in has cars zipping by? And what about the time you are waiting in a queue, like at a toll booth and the two lanes on either side seem to move much faster than yours? And getting impatient when it seems that the car backing out of a parking spot you want to take always takes longer than usual?

Enter Tom Vanderbilt, my knight in shining armour, who also thought all these things and more, did a lot of research and got a lot of studies and influential people to back his observations and has now written a book with a deceptively simple title — Traffic. In which he says that traffic is as “much an emotional problem as it is a physical and a mechanical one”. For example, one of the reasons for road rage (that he cutely calls “traffic tantrums”) is a reaction to maintain our identity — we are angry because we are anonymous in traffic. It is this sense of anonymity, on the flip side, that also “induces aggression”. He also says that our habit of looking at the rear ends of the cars in front of us is indicative of “culturally associated subordination”. And can you imagine what happens when the rear end of the car in front of you has a bumper sticker that says: “Horn broken. Watch for finger”?

Evolutionary biology is just one of the many resources that Vanderbilt has used to make his point. Consider his application of Thomas Schelling’s Game Theory to driving, that he says, is filled with moments of impromptu decision making and brinkmanship. And before you fire your driver consider the fact that driving requires 1,500 “sub-skills”— navigating through terrain, scanning the environment, maintain a position on the road, making decisions, judging speed and so on! In fact, we have multiple personalities — we are very different people behind the wheel. Vanderbilt gives an example of “an otherwise timorous Latin teacher” who defiantly “stuck it” to the driver of an 18-wheeler who he felt was hogging the road. How many of us know such people?

And people who think that they are the better drivers? Like my father who still has something to say every two minutes while sitting in the passenger seat. And like all the men in the world “who honk more than women” and “more at women”. Vanderbilt says it is not really their fault as they have what is called metacognition — men inflate their own driving abilities simply because they are actually not capable of rendering an accurate judgement! Well actually, Vanderbilt says that applies to all of us but we don’t need to get into those details here, because anyway all of us “cannot pay attention”, especially while driving; Vanderbilt quotes Einstein: “Any man who can drive while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.”

As it turns out, not surprisingly, human attention is a fragile thing. While driving, Vanderbilt illustrates, with a lot of studies, we really do not “read” traffic signs; suffer from motion parallax and thus misjudge the speed of the car in front and behind us; and resort to competitive behavioural traits and decide at the most “critical density movement” to go haywire (“from cooperativeness to extreme competition in the blink of tail light”). That is why, like a character in the movie Italian Job says: “Doesn’t matter what time it is. It’s either bad traffic, peak traffic, or slit-your-wrists traffic.”

Like the traffic in New Delhi, to which Vanderbilt has dedicated an entire sub-chapter, self-explanatorily titled “‘Good brakes, Good Horn, Good Luck’: Plunging into the Maelstrom of New Delhi Traffic”. Need a better reason to “pick” this book up?

TRAFFIC
WHY WE DRIVE THE WAY WE DO (AND WHAT IT SAYS ABOUT US)

Tom Vanderbilt
Allen Lane (an imprint of Penguin Books)
375 pages
Price not stated