Earlier this year, Portland enhanced its bike-friendly status by becoming the first US city to be designated a Platinum-level Bicycle Friendly Community. In 2006, then Commissioner now Mayor-elect, Sam Adams had launched a nine-part strategy to win that status and called together advocates and community leaders to work toward achieving the goal. Mission accomplished as they say.

There is a problem though. In Portland and across the nation as more people are affected by the high price of gas and switch to the bicycle for their commute tensions are rising between car drivers and cyclists. Along comes a timely new book – ‘Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do’ by Tom Vanderbilt which has been reviewed by Mary Roach, who admits to a map-reading-while -driving induced fender bender in Portland a few years ago. Reading this book may help understand the psyche of the person behind the wheel – human nature is at fault.

For anyone interested in the way traffic flows and why you find yourself sitting in many traffic jams this book seems to be a good read. What follows are bullet points that I’ve pulled from Roach’s review:

01. Traffic jams are not caused by flaws in road design but by flaws in human nature.
02. Gawkers cause a 12.7% increase in traffic slowdown after a crash and the rubberneckers themselves are so busy gawking that they often slam into the car in front of them as it brakes for the driver to get a better look.
03. Drivers will slow down to look at anything, even a couch dumped in a roadside ditch.
04. Starbucks places stores with drive-through lanes on opposite sides of the road to spare drivers the “agony of having to make a left turn during rush hour.”
05. In a 15 block area around UCLA drivers logged on an average day 3600 miles looking for a place to park.
06. Add a new highway and drivers will defect from others to clog it up.
07. Americans won’t accept congestion charging to help reduce traffic.
08. They will accept a surcharge for peak-travel time hotel rooms and airfares though.
09. We think we are good drivers and that’s a problem as we base that on the number of accidents we’ve been in instead of on the number of accidents we narrowly avoid.
10. In ancient Rome, Caesar declared a daytime ban on chariots and carts as traffic was so bad!

And how does this affect bicyclists? Well, Vanderbilt’s research has discovered that drivers pass bicyclists more closely on a road with bike lanes than on one without. And pedestrians can’t win either – more people are killed while crossing in crosswalks than while jaywalking.

The solution appears to be that we should separate cars, bicyclists and pedestrians and also implement a congestion charge on drivers to reduce the amount of cars in cities. Portland seems to be the best candidate for this experiment. Go Sam.