I read Tom Vanderbilt’s book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do earlier this year and it was an eye opener. He dissects driving behavior across a wide variety of situations, including lane merging, traffic signals, eye contact at speed, and pedestrian interaction. He sites numerous studies to analyse many of the misconceptions we have about how skilled we are at driving and how we deal with each other on the road.

From the NY Times book review:

Vanderbilt, who writes regularly about design and technology, cites a finding that 12.7 percent of the traffic slowdown after a crash has nothing to do with wreckage blocking lanes; it’s caused by gawkers. Rubberneckers attend to the spectacle so avidly that they themselves thenget into accidents, slamming into the car in front of them when it brakes to get a better look or dig out a cellphone to take a picture. (This happens often enough for traffic types to have coined a word for it: “digi-necking.”)

It’s now available in paperback, and I highly recommend it.