A Fucktard's Guide To Driving

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So, I've been thinking in recent days of writing a book called something like "Why you're a fucktard and how to change." I made up a little definition for fucktard -- someone who out of insolence or self-absorption behaves in a manner suggesting mental disability -- and came up with little explanations of everyday feedbacks like "if you stand in front of the subway doors, the people on the train can not leave, so the car can not leave. It doesn't matter how quickly you get on, as you're not leaving without the train," and "if you stand in the street waiting to cross, or even on the very edge of the curb, motorists will slow down, the street will not clear, and you cross later than you would have had you waited more than 12 inches back from the curb."

Just, you know, a path fucktards could follow to get themselves out of the hell they create and share with other people. I don't have the time to write such a book, and I can't maintain the negativity and self-righteousness it would require. Obviously, this idea only possesses me during my morning commute. Which is full of fucktards.

I was then pleased to see that this has been done for motorists, whom you might suspect start at a little disadvantage crawling out of fucktarddom.

[Tom Vanderbilt, who wrote "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do"] disappeared for three years into the university warrens of road scholars, who, more than 125 years after the advent of the automobile, are legend. "There are people with entire academic careers devoted to off-ramps," he says.

This was my dream in 10th grade, by the way -- to be one of these people. I wasn't even thinking of the beneficial confusion introduction myself as a 'road scholar' might create.

Perhaps most eye-opening is Vanderbilt's declaration that "the way we drive is responsible for a good part of our traffic problems." That's right, it's not what urban philosophers Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, James Howard Kunstler and, well, my brother and I, in our 1993 book, "Where the Road and the Sky Collide: America Through the Eyes of Its Drivers," have been saying all along -- we are burning in traffic hell for our greedy sins of rampant urban sprawl.

No, what's gumming up the highways are hideously self-absorbed drivers who weave in and out of lanes -- creating a chain reaction of people stepping on the brakes -- desperate to get to some utterly inane appointment for which they think they can't be late. It's not that America has too many people and too few highways. Nearly 90 percent of our roads are not congested 90 percent of the time. Look at it this way: If one-fifth of solo drivers hitched a ride with neighbors or friends to the business park or mall, we'd be sailing along Happy Highway every day.

The tall and slender Vanderbilt, a rather soft-spoken scholar himself, doesn't resort to loud adverbs to make his points about congestion. In his book, he gives way to traffic behaviorist Alan Pisarski, who blames affluence for cities jammed with narcissists in BMWs. Congestion, Pisarski says, is "people with the economic means to act on their social and economic interests getting in the way of other people with the means to act on theirs."