The Broadway director Arthur Whitelaw, who created Snoopy! The Musical, is to direct its 21st anniversary production in London. "It is a show that is very dear to my heart," says Whitelaw, who last directed the musical in 1983, first on Broadway, with Lorna Luft as Peppermint Patty, and then in London's West End. Whitelaw wrote Snoopy! as a sequel to his 1967 adaptation of the Peanuts comic strip, You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. And that's not all he has to be pleased about: the man who gave Liza Minnelli her first stage role, opposite Christopher Walken in Best Foot Forward, and cast Jodie Foster in Tom Sawyer, is celebrating 50 years in showbusiness this year.Snoopy! brings the creations of Charles Schulz to life with a big band, jazz-style score by Larry Grossman and Hal Hackaday. The real lesson for us is the case for using regulation to keep mopeds and motorbikes as silent and pollution-free as possible, and use tax to keep their engine size down. As car ownership rises, let's hope that this benign attitude prevails.And can we learn? If they could bottle up their road courtesy and sell it, the Cambodians could make a fortune.

And since hardly anyone wears helmets, the moped riders are not cut off from each other either.Two questions. Will this good-tempered world last? And what can we learn from it?On the first, there is a little hope, for one reason. Car drivers behave as though they were on mopeds - they weave in and out but they give way, they don't cut up other users and never get angry. There are hardly any traffic police - which must improve tempers; and the one bit of legislation that I tracked down (that only three people can ride on a moped) is not enforced.I suspect that road manners are improved because there are few cars and hence so few people shut off in their steel boxes.

Fuel is expensive, which encourages small engines, and there must be noise and pollution controls because rarely do you see smoke But the explanation is more in social controls. There seem to be few accidents, which is a good thing, since helmets are rare. There's no showing off, no cutting up, no bad tempers, no self-righteousness, no machismo, not even much obvious pollution - everyone just gets around as swiftly and calmly as practicable.How do they do it? It must be partly policy. The mopeds are 50cc to 125cc jobs, tuned for silence rather than speed Standard speed is 15mph. Just the stopwatch, hitherto unseen on a production 911 and seeming, on first encounter, worryingly close to cheesy.