Driving

Have you ever read a book about automobile driving? Oh, there are lots of books about cars, racing, touring, and plenty of how-to books -- but have you ever read a book about the activity of driving iteself? Considering how much time people spending driving, it's remarkable that there aren't zillions of books on the subject, but I haven't seen a single one -- have you? (If you have, please let me know!)

The idea for a book on driving occurred to me a few years ago when I first started commuting to work (before that, I'd walked, bicycled, or taken public transportation), and was having my initiation to rush-hour driving. Nearly every trip, something happened to me that was worth mentioning, either to my officemates in the morning or to Lisa in the evening. Often one story would lead to another; it seemed like everybody was interested in it.

About this time, the possibility arose that I might be spending an indefinite amount of time in Los Angeles, helping my mother-in-law refurbish her house. I knew that the automobile culture there would wear on me if I didn't do something about it, and it occurred to me that the project of writing a book about driving would turn even the most unpleasant day in traffic into source material.

What would a book about driving have in it? Here are some of the things it might contain:

• Anecdotes about driving. There are a million of them out there, both real and fictional.
• The psychology of driving. Human beings evolved in an environment which had no activity remotely like driving, and yet most people can learn to drive pretty well; how is this? In what ways is driving unnatural? The behavior of drivers.
• Driving and game theory. For many drivers, driving is a kind of competition: "can I get there ahead of the other guy?" -- or simply "can I get there in one piece?" In either case, there are a lot of principles in game theory that could be applied to driving.
• Sign language used by drivers. There's a fairly small repertoire of sign language used by drivers. How could this be expanded? (For example: one piece of sign language I saw for the first time just a few days ago was using the hazards lights to me "I'm not turning, I'm coming straight through" at an intersection where most people turned.) There's also the possibility of making cars themselves more expressive.
• Accidents. This would be a major section, including: how to make sense of accident statistics, the automobile insurance industry, tradeoffs between speed and safety, my theory of how accidents happen, how to avoid accidents, etc.
• Road and freeway design. A lot of thought has gone into how roads work, and it's something most drivers take completely for granted. The geometry of turns. The varieties of overpass design.
• Photographs. I've seen some amazing things while driving, and I've seen some even more amazing photographs; this book would be a good excuse to collect them all.

The Los Angeles house project never materialized, but the idea for this book continued to appeal to me. Occasionally I browse bookstores looking for a book like this, but I haven't looked too hard -- partly, I think, because I don't want to find it.