EMISSIONS:If bad driving is contagious and your children will drive like you do, how many taxi drivers does it take to save the world? asks KILIAN DOYLE
I HAVE LATELY been perusing a jolly little book called Boringology, which outlines 77 of the most "nerdy, bizarre and bewildering scientific projects that just might change the world".
While some of the experiments are mad, unglamorous or downright inane, many raise interesting questions. For example, does ditch water merit its reputation for dullness? Exactly how tedious is watching paint dry? And what can we learn from an exhaustive analysis of sexual fetishism in baby quails?
As this is ostensibly a motoring column, my interest was directed to an Israeli study which claims that you are more likely to be a roadhog if you are married to a bad driver. “For better, for worse” apparently applies to motoring habits too.
“Their partner’s driving style may contribute to women’s tendency for reckless driving behaviour and the likelihood of their committing traffic violations,” the research argues. (Remember that the next time your wife crashes into a wall while doing her eyeliner. You’ve no right to be angry – it’s your fault.)
They proffer two possible explanations for this conclusion. First, they suggest people may, over time, learn to copy their partner’s behaviour. Alternately, it may be that their shared driving style was one of the factors that brought them together in the first place.
I wonder does this relationship apply to one’s offspring? If I plonk my son Turbo in the front of my parked car, he’ll hop up and down like a gibbon on crack, yanking the wheel, tweaking every lever within reach and yapping happily to himself. Just like his father, so. Indeed, so attached is he to my car that getting him out has proved such an ordeal that I’ve got a pair of water buffalo on standby for those occasions when nothing will do but to drag him out.
His sister, Reduced Emissions, is far less enthusiastic. She just sits there admiring herself in the rearview mirror. Can’t imagine where she gets that from. However, when I’m giving it some beans on the open road with her in the back, she dissolves into a giggling mess whenever the turbo kicks in. As a result, I harbour great fears that my cherubic daughter will grow up to be a crazed girl racer – like her mother.
I seek consolation in my belief that cars will be practically uncrashable by the time she’s old enough to drive. The futurologist in me can foresee a day they’ll all be equipped with sensors preventing them from bumping into anything. Why not? Ants manage it perfectly well already, and their brains are slightly smaller than the average backbencher’s.
Speaking of which, another Boringologychapter addresses a related subject, namely the brain power of cabbies. A study by the University of London found that London taxi drivers have a much larger mid-posterior hippocampus and more grey matter than bus drivers. This, the boffins say, is because the cabbies have to remember 25,000 streets and thousands of landmarks, while bus drivers merely follow set routes.
Their finding begs the question: Are Dublin taxi drivers – whose beat covers a city one-tenth the size of London – consequently one-tenth as clever as their Cockney counterparts? And what about Paddy Mac, whose hinterland is a three-street village in the west of Ireland? Is he thick as a hedge?
The researchers warned that the increasing use of GPS could lead to a loss of this extra grey matter, as cabbies learn to rely on technology rather than on their bonces.
Anyway, to the moral of the story: If a cabbie ferrying you around a major city using brain power alone deigns to divulge his panacea for the planet, listen to him. He may be onto something. On the other hand, if Paddy Mac starts pontificating, ignore him completely. No matter how much he tries to convince you, he has no more idea how to save the world than you or I.