Where’s the Great American Driving Manual?
I have been looking for this for a long time. Something less about compliance, more about quiet excellence in the ubiquitous craft. Not about the exceptional moments—crashes, races—but about the vast grinding bulk. Obviously I’m motivated by my own awkward inadequacy. I once got picked up by a friend in a rush from a crowd at another friend’s house and he peeled out of the long, winding, hilly driveway in reverse. What a thrill! What ease!
I was recently reminded of all this when I read the preface to the tenth anniversary edition of James Wood’s How Fiction Works, which begins:
“There is only one recipe — to care a great deal for the cookery.
— Henry JamesIn 1857, John Ruskin wrote a small book called The Elements of Drawing. It’s a primer, an introduction, a short history; but it’s also a very individual essay, full of passionate bias. It speaks to both the ordinary art lover and the better-versed painter. Above all, it is a book about looking. Ruskin begins by urging his reader to study nature — to study a leaf, say, and then to copy it in pencil. He includes his own drawing of a leaf. He moves from a leaf to a painting by Tintoretto: notice the brushstrokes, he says, see how he draws the hands, look at how he pays attention to the shading. Ruskin’s authority comes not from his own authority as a draftsman, but from what his eye has seen and how well, and his ability to transmit that vision into prose.
I’d think that after all this time we’d have some half-artful classic of the driving manual genre. But it doesn’t seem we do! Still, I’ve collected what I’ve seen so far below.
Some are more practical than others. Some aren’t even close to manuals. The early ones have a huge amount of mechanical stuff and paraphernalia that we’d now consider totally irrelevant to operating the vehicle! I guess at that point the operator was also typically maintainer and mechanic, and the models on the road were so varied that skills weren’t so transferable.
In order of publication. Titles are links! The old ones are free online!
Hints on Driving
C. Morley Knight, 1894
It’s about horses lol:
Before starting, always have a good look round, and see that all the harness is put on correctly; then go to the off side of the horse and take the reins in the right hand, the near rein under the forefinger and the off rein under the third finger. Get up into the cart and sit down immediately; now transfer the reins into the left hand, the near rein over the forefinger, and the off rein under the middle finger. Thus you have two fingers between the reins (fig. 2). The reason for this is that it gives much more scope for play of the wrist on the horse’s mouth than if you only have one finger between the reins. The thumb should point straight to the right, and the forefinger be held well out, pointing to the right rear. This will keep the near rein close up to the knuckle, and the horse may easily be moved across the road to either the left or right by turning the back of the hand up or down respectively.
Cars and How to Drive Them, Vol. II
Charles Jarrott et al., 1905
Doesn’t talk about operation of a generic abstract automobile at all!! Talks about one model at a time.
How To Drive An Automobile
Victor Lougheed, 1908
Pretty cool even though the archive.org scan is missing a lot of the early even-numbered pages. Ton of info about how the motor and crankshaft and stuff work! Full stack!
The Highway Code
UK Department of Transportation, 1931– (via @macroblues)
Remember that all persons — pedestrians, cyclists, persons leading, riding or driving animals and the drivers of motor or horse–drawn vehicles — have a right to use the highway and an obligation to respect the rights of others. Good manners and consideration for others are as desirable and are as much appreciated on the road as elsewhere.
American readers should substitute “have a left”.
The Image of the City
Kevin Lynch, 1960
The Image of the City is a 1960 book by American urban theorist Kevin Lynch. The book is the result of a five-year study of Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles on how observers take in information of the city, and use it to make mental maps. Lynch’s conclusion was that people formed mental maps of their surroundings consisting of five basic elements… which Lynch identifies as Paths, Edges, Districts, Nodes, and Landmarks. —Wikipedia
Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies
Reyner Banham, 1971
The four are: Surfurbia, Foothills, The Plains of Id, and Autopia. Under the last he writes:
The private car and the public freeway together provide an ideal—not to say idealized—version of democratic urban transportation: door-to-door movement on demand at high average speeds over a very large area. The degree of freedom and convenience thus offered to all but a small (but now conspicuous) segment of the population is such that no Angeleno will be in a hurry to sacrifice it for the higher efficiency but drastically lowered convenience and freedom of choice of any high-density public rapid-transit system. Yet what seems to be hardly noticed or commented on is that the price of rapid door-to-door transport on demand is the almost total surrender of personal freedom for most of the journey.
The watchful tolerance and almost impeccable lane discipline of Angeleno drivers on the freeways is often noticed, but not the fact that both are symptoms of something deeper—willing acquiescence in an incredibly demanding man/machine system. The fact that no single ordinance, specification or instruction manual describes the system in its totality does not make it any less complete or all-embracing — or any less demanding. It demands, first of all, an open but decisive attitude to the placing of the car on the road-surface, a constant stream of decisions that it would be fashionable to describe as ‘existential’ or even ‘situational’, but would be better to regard simply as a higher form of pragmatism. The carriage-way is not divided by the kind of kindergarten rule of the road that obtains on British motorways, with their fast, slow, and overtaking lanes (where there are three lanes to use!). The three, four, or five lanes of an Angeleno freeway are virtually equal, the driver is required to select or change lanes according to his speed, surrounding circumstances and future intentions. If everybody does this with the approved mixture of enlightened self-interest and public spirit, it is possible to keep a very large flow of traffic moving quite surprisingly fast.
But at certain points, notably intersections, the lanes are not all equal—some may be pre-empted for a particular exit or change-over ramp as much as a mile before the actual junction. As far as possible the driver must get set up for these pre-empted lanes well in advance, to be sure he is in them in good time because the topology of the intersections is unforgiving. Of course there are occasional clods and strangers who do not sense the urgency of the obligation to set up the lane required good and early, but fortunately they are only occasional (you soon get the message!), otherwise the whole system would snarl up irretrievably. But if these preparations are only an unwritten moral obligation, your actual presence in the correct lane at the inter-section is mandatory—the huge signs straddling the freeway to indicate the correct lanes must be obeyed because they are infallible.
At first, these signs can be the most psychologically unsettling of all aspects of the freeway—it seems incredibly bizarre when a sign directs on into the far left lane for an objective clearly visible on the right of the carriageway, but the sign must be believed. No human eye at windscreen level can unravel the complexities of even a relatively simple intersection (none of those in Los Angeles is a symmetrical cloverleaf) fast enough for a normal human brain moving forward at up to sixty mph to make the right decision in time, and there is no alternative to complete surrender of will to the instructions on the signs.
But no permanent system of fixed signs can give warning of transient situations requiring decisions, such as accidents, landslips or other blockages. It is in the nature of a freeway accident that it involves a large number of vehicles, and blocks the carriageway so completely that even emergency vehicles have difficulty in getting to the seat of the trouble, and remedial action such as warnings and diversions may have to be phased back miles before the accident, and are likely to affect traffic moving in the opposite direction in the other carriageway as well. So, inevitably the driver has to rely on other sources of rapid information, and keeps his car radio turned on for warnings of delays and recommended diversions.
Was he too enamored of the integral sublime to have been capable of writing the great practical manual if he’d tried? See also “Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles” (1972):
Compare Steve Duenes’s How to Walk in New York (2015).
Effective Horsemanship
Noel Jackson, 1972
Spotted by Max Krieger in a thrift shop.
Going Faster! Mastering the Art of Race Driving
Carl Lopez, 1997
Recommended by Lloyd, definitely the most knowledgeable car aficionado I know!! In school I really struggled with a class on calculus of variations and optimal control, so this one’s funny because it’s sort of like very applied optimal control. Not easy to apply to my own life, though.
How I Learned to Drive
Paula Vogel, 1997
Stage play with a flipped perspective from some of these. Very grim.
How to Drive Into Accidents and How Not To
Robert A. Pease, 1998
Wait this is pretty good!! It’s weirdly sassy and informal and under-edited; it’s self-published and it shows. He seems to have written it because he just had to get it out. Passionate, opinionated, angry. You can borrow the e-book from archive.org. It’s a mess, almost more like a zine. He has a liability disclaimer snaking around the margin of every new chapter, sometimes doing lil wavy zigzags up the page for kicks.
There are subheds like “Angels??” and “Hats?” and “Bumblebees…”. In the “Safety Equipment” chapter, the first item he recommends is money: “Money is often the best safety equipment. Because if you need some other safety equipment, you can often buy it.” He’s hand-drawn all sorts of different ways you can skid. There’s a chapter “When To Break The Law”. There’s a detailed recounting of each of the thirteen accidents he’s gotten in. He recommends soldering a buzzer into the ignition wiring to alert you if you’ve left your lights on — “You just need one little diode.” There’s an appendix on how to fly an airplane. At the end of Chapter 57 (which is not the end of the book), he writes:
WELL — this is the last Chapter I wrote. I just sat and typed, with my cup of Yuban coffee. Hey, this writing stuff is fun, and challenging, and a lot of work. Man. I’m glad I have finished off all the text.
There are some cringeworthy parts, but it’s the closest to what I was imagining that I’ve seen. (Reviewed by Whole Earth here; original book website here.)
Apparently he was a legendary analog integrated circuit designer at National Semiconductor. On June 18, 2011, at 5:45 p.m., he was leaving the memorial service for fellow analog designer Jim Williams in his ’69 VW Bug when he lost control on a leftward curve and hit a large tree on the right shoulder. He died instantly, aged 70. He was not wearing his seatbelt.
Some would call this ironic. As if the guy who “wrote the book” is less at risk! People don’t write books about stuff they don’t worry about.
Other more recent manuals suggested on Twitter
- The Ultimate Guide To Defensive Driving: Protect Yourself And Your Loved Ones From Road Rage With These Important Defensive Driving Safety Tips And Techniques, by John Summers, 2010 (via @financialtailor)
- Survive Your Drive: Defensive Driving Techniques, by Jonathan Serge, 2011 (via @financialtailor)
- Advanced Driving: How to further skill and enjoyment in motoring, by John Lyon, 2012 (via Lorcan)
- Mindful Defensive Driving, by Gerald Hamel, 2016 (via @financialtailor)
- The Most Complete Book on Advanced Defensive Driving, by Bill Kennedy, c. 2018? (via @financialtailor)
I haven’t checked out the stuff people passed along from the past twenty years, but there it is. There’s so much stuff that hasn’t passed the test of time yet that it’s too overwhelming.
I think this response captures the passion I feel is missing from most manuals, except Pease’s:
I’d have liked to see John Berger’s attempt, judging by Ways of Seeing. Or William H. Whyte’s, judging by The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. I want one by an NYC cabbie and one by a long-haul trucker. Two by Modesto teens—one by John Milner, one by Carol.
My generation, which grew up with him as only an election spoiler, probably does not appreciate Ralph Nader enough for Unsafe at Any Speed.
Does On the Road have any cool driving tips?
I’m a big fan of Lewis Lehe’s traffic visualization work.
This is pretty profound, I think, and gets to the heart of it:
Tacit local process knowledge! Writing about driving may be even harder than dancing about architecture! You can’t get it in a book! I’m missing the point! (But do cf. How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel.)
Thanks to all who replied!
And thanks to archive.org and Project Gutenberg!
At the start of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (written 1930–1943, set in 1913), two people are walking and witness an accident, a body lying on the street:
The gentleman, after some silence, said to her: “These heavy lorries they use here have too long a braking-distance.” Somehow the lady felt relieved at hearing this, and she thanked him with an attentive glance. People walked on with the almost justifiable impression that what had occurred was an event within the proper framework of law and order.
