ENTERTAINMENT

It is a rare book that presumes to explain so many mysteries of human behavior, such as why "park sharks" circle endlessly looking for a space, why rush hour seems to keep getting worse and why every other driver on the road is an idiot. Remarkably, Traffic succeeds in all three, and much more besides.

JOHN CRAIG/Special Contributor

Mr. Vanderbilt, a design and technology writer, has tackled one of the most universal experiences in the developed world: piloting a large machine at high speeds among people you don't know. On the face of things, he notes, it's a wonder anyone gets on the road at all. But we do, and in massive numbers. How do we do it?

Be warned: This is no pop-psychology treatment of driving habits, but a deeply researched, technical insight into the nature of how people interact on the roads. Mr. Vanderbilt visits traffic engineers in Los Angeles, where lights are carefully rigged on Oscar night to allow limousines to arrive at the awards ceremony on time, and New Delhi, where cows are unplanned obstacles within the frenzied congestion.

He interviews Hans Monderman, a now-deceased Dutch traffic engineer who defied convention by removing nearly all the traffic signs and road markings in a hazardous village intersection. And he hangs out with zoologists who study complex social behavior in ant communities to see how they cope with getting their group from one place to another in the most efficient manner possible.

The facts are eye-opening and excellent fodder for cocktail party conversations:

Men are more likely than women to be killed in a car crash, but women are more likely to be involved in nonfatal crashes, thus complicating arguments over which gender is the better driver. Belgium has a far higher rate of fatal crashes than the Netherlands, for reasons that have less to do with driver habits and more to do with the country's corruption index. Our visual and neural systems are practically hard-wired to give us incorrect information about judging the distance to a car in front of us or the existence of a train speeding toward us from the side.

Yet the lessons learned here reverberate for anyone who's ever gotten behind a wheel. After reading Traffic, you'll quite likely become one of those annoying people who stays in the lane that's getting shut down right up until the merge point, then edge your way in. (And you'll know why doing so actually helps congestion for everyone.) You'll worry less about driving on the Fourth of July and more about driving on an ordinary Saturday night. And you may think just a bit more seriously about taking mass transit.

Alexandra Witze is chief of correspondents for America for the international science journal Nature.

Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)

Tom Vanderbilt

(Knopf, $24.95)