“I commute 40 kilometres a day,” John Ross Harvey explains in a phone interview.

His job as a draftsman for a construction company means long hours on our city’s roads – and what he saw led him to write a driving handbook:  Harvey The Happy Helmet's Illustrated How To Drive Handbook - A Drive By Education.

“Basically, I see a lot of very bad motorist’s habits, so I’m trying to indicate what bad things are as funnily as possible so you actually learn from it,” he said.

“I see all this evidence around me. A lot of my material is traffic-based observation.”

This year, he decided to enter the self-published guide in the Toronto Book Awards.

“I only found out about them because Mayor [David] Miller tweeted about the last group of winners. I didn’t know it existed before then,” he said.

“I found it very easy to enter – you just have to provide six copies and that’s it.”

On the book’s website, Harvey describes himself as the Simon Cowell of the driving reality show of life.

“You find in American Idol he’s obviously extremely brutally mean. If he doesn’t like your singing he tells you, so you have to learn from that. You learn when it’s really bad, you have to get the message across. You have to drive it home, so you actually understand how bad you are,” he said.

Harvey wrote the book with no government involvement and no contact with the Ministry of Transportation.

“No, I’m not a driving instructor,” he said.

“I have taken a racing course many many years ago in Mont Tremblant. It’s the Jim Russell Racing School. I completed two courses there, in Formula 1600 and Formula 2000. They go over simple driving tasks on a race course. You know, how you take a corner properly, mirrors mean everything. You have to know what’s around you.

“I see things being done from both sides – pedestrians and drivers- wrong, a lot. I’m always scanning the area around me and I do see pedestrians crossing my path every so often. They’re not looking.  A lot of them are not looking. Definitely, the cars are not being safety-conscious. You know, they’re turning the wrong way into the wrong lane, they’re speeding because the light is yellow, stuff like that.”

Harvey The Happy Helmet's Illustrated How To Drive Handbook - A Drive By Education is available online ($8 for a bound copy; $2.50 for a digital download).