Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) | 
 enlarge | Author: Tom Vanderbilt
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
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Rating:  54 reviews
Sales Rank: 579
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 416
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Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 0307264785
Dewey Decimal Number: 629.283
EAN: 9780307264787
Publication Date: July 29, 2008
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, July 2008: How could no one have written this book before? These days we spend almost as much time driving as we do eating (in fact, we do a lot of our eating while driving), but I can't remember the last time I saw a book on all the time we spend stuck in our cars. It's a topic of nearly universal interest, though: everybody has a strategy for beating the traffic. Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) has plenty of advice for those shortcut schemers (Vanderbilt may well convince you to become, as he has, a dreaded "Late Merger"), but more than that it's the sort of wide-ranging contrarian compendium that makes a familiar subject new. I'm not the first or last to call Traffic the Freakonomics of cars, but it's true that it fits right in with the school of smart and popular recent books by Leavitt, Gladwell, Surowiecki, Ariely, and others that use the latest in economic, sociological, psychological, and in this case civil engineering research to make us rethink a topic we live with every day. Want to know how much city traffic is just people looking for parking? (It's a lot.) Or why street signs don't work (but congestion pricing does), why new cars crash more than old cars, and why Saturdays now have the worst traffic of the week? Read Traffic, or better yet, listen to the audio book on your endless commute. --Tom Nissley
Questions for Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic
Q: Was this book really born on a New Jersey highway?
A: Yes, though it could have been any highway in the world, where countless drivers, driving on a crowded road that is about to lose a lane, have had to make a simple decision: When to merge. For my entire driving life, I had always merged "early," thinking it was the polite and efficient thing to do. I viewed those who kept driving to the merge point, to the front of line, as selfish jerks who were making life miserable for the rest of us. I began to wonder: Were they really making things worse? Was I making things worse? Could merging be made easier? Why were there late mergers and early mergers, and why did people get so worked up about the whole thing? In that everyday moment I seemed to sense a vast, largely under-explored wilderness before me: Traffic.
Q: Is it true that the most common cause of stress on the highway is merging? Why of the myriad things to cause stress on the road is this at the top?
A: Merging is the most stressful single activity we face in everyday driving, according to a survey by the Texas Transportation Institute. People who have done studies at highway construction work zones have also told me of extraordinarily bad behavior, triggered by this simple act of trying to get two lanes of traffic into one. Sometimes, it s simply the difficult mechanics of driving trying to enter a stream of traffic flowing at a higher speed than you are, for example. Drivers, to quote a physicist who was actually talking about grains, are objects "who do not easily interact." But I also think there s something about the forward flow of traffic that makes us register progress only by our own unimpeded movement; as in life, we seem to register losses more powerfully than gains, and registering these losses boosts stress.
Q: You say that, "For most of us who are not brain surgeons, driving is probably the most complex everyday thing we do in our lives." How so?
A: Researchers have estimated there are anywhere from 1500 to 2500 discrete skills and activities we undertake while driving. Even the simplest thing shifting gears is a decision-making process consuming what is called "cognitive workload." We re operating heavy machinery at speeds beyond our long evolutionary history, absorbing (and discarding) huge amounts of information, and having to make snap decisions often based on limited situational awareness, guesses about what others are going to do, or a hazy knowledge of the actual traffic law. It took years of research, for example, by some of the country s top robotics researchers, to create expensive, sophisticated self-driving "autonomous vehicles" that are basically mediocre beginning drivers that you d never want to let loose in everyday traffic. When we forget that driving isn t necessarily as easy as it seems to be, we get into trouble.
Q: Drivers polled in America say the roads are getting less civil with each passing year. Road Rage is an ever more common term. What is to blame? Hummers? Or are we just getting ruder?
A: Every year, more people are driving more miles, so one reason for the sense that the roads are getting less civil is simply that there are many more chances for you to have an encounter with an aggressive or rude driver. It s tough to put numbers on it, but I happen to feel, like many people, that behavior has gotten qualitatively worse surveys have suggested, for example, that using the turn signal is an increasingly optional activity. Leaving aside the issue that not signaling is illegal (because, let s face it, we re never going to be able ticket everyone who doesn t do it, nor do we probably want to), it s one of those small things, requiring little effort from the driver, that makes traffic flow more smoothly I myself have honked countless times at "idiots" slowing for no apparent reason, only to seem them eventually make a turn. It s antisocial behavior, the equivalent of having the door held open for you and saying nothing in return. So why don t people signal? My immediate theory is that they re using a cell phone and are distracted or physically incapable of signaling. But a deeper reason, I suspect, may be seen in the surveys of psychologists who measure narcissism in American culture. They find, as time goes on, more people are willing to say things like "If I ruled the world, it would be a better place." Traffic is filled with people who think that roads belong only to them it s "MySpace" that being inside the car absolves them from any obligation to anyone else. People are glad to tell you that their child is a middle school honor student as if anyone cared! but they deem it less important to tell you what they re going to do in traffic.
Q: So much of what you uncover about life on the road seems counterintuitive. Like the fact that drivers drive closer to oncoming cars when there is a center line divider then when there is not; that most accidents happen close to home in familiar, not foreign, surroundings; that dangerous roads can be safer; safer cars can be more dangerous; that suburbs are often riskier than the inner city; the roundabout safer than the intersection. When it comes to traffic why are things so different from how we instinctively perceive them?
A: I think part of the reason is it s easy for us to confuse what feels dangerous or safe in the moment and what might be, in a larger sense, safe or dangerous. We have a windshield s eye view of driving that sometimes blinds us to larger realities or skews our perception. Roundabouts feel dangerous because of all the work one has to do, like looking for an opening, jockeying for positioning. But it s precisely because we have to do all that, and because of the way roundabouts are designed, that we have to slow down. By contrast, it feels quite "safe" to sail through a big intersection where the lights are telling you that you have the right to speed through. We can, in essence, put our brain on hold. But those same intersections contain so many more chances for what engineers call "conflict," and at much higher speeds, than roundabouts. So when what seems quite safe suddenly turns quite dangerous will we be as well prepared? Similarly, we might be reassured that that yellow or white dividing line on a road is telling us where we should be, but how does that knowledge then change our behavior, to the point where may actually be driving closer and faster to the stream of oncoming traffic? Accidents are more likely to occur closer to home. Mostly this is because we do most driving closer to home, but studies do show that we pay less attention to signs and signals on local roads, because we "know" them, yet this knowledge actually give us a false sense of security.
Q: What were some of the things that most surprised you in researching this book?
A: Things that surprised me the most were those that challenged my own long-held beliefs as a driver, like that "late mergers" simply must be somehow worse for the traffic flow at work-zones, that roundabouts were dangerous places, that warning signs were there because they must be working, that car drivers were more of a contributing factor in truck-car crashes than truck drivers. It was also quite a revelation to learn about the many ways our eyes and our minds deceive us while driving, the ways we "look but don t see," the way we sometimes believe, to slightly change up the warning our mirrors gives us, that objects are further away than they actually are. Then there were the things I had never really thought about, but were surprising nonetheless that drivers seem to pass closer to cyclists when those cyclists are wearing helmets, how the ways in which drivers honk at each other contain subtle indications of status and demographics, how much traffic on the streets is simply people looking for parking. I was also unpleasantly surprised to learn how far the U.S. had slipped in terms of traffic safety in the world, where it was once the leader.
Q: You write, "The truth is the road itself tells us far more than signs do." So do traffic signs work?
A: We ve probably all had the somewhat absurd moment of driving in the country, past a big red barn, the pungent smell of cow manure on the breeze, and then seeing a yellow traffic sign with a cow on it. Does anyone need that sign to remind them that cows may be nearby? To quote Hans Monderman, the legendary Dutch traffic engineer who was opposed to excessive signing, "if you treat people like idiots, they ll act like idiots." Then again, perhaps someone did come blazing along and hit a crossing cow or a tractor, and in response engineers may have been forced to put up a sign. The question is: Would that person have done that regardless of the sign? The bulk of evidence is that people don t change their behavior in the presence of such signs. Children playing, School zone? People speed through those warnings, faster than they even thought, if you query them later. To take another example, the majority of people killed at railroad crossings in the U.S. are killed at crossings where the gates are down. If this is insufficient warning that they should not cross the tracks then is a sign warning that a train might be coming really going to change behavior? At what point do people need to rely on their own judgment? We as humans seem to act on the message that traffic signs give us in complex ways studies have shown, for example, that people drive faster around curved roads that are marked with signs telling them the road is curved. We tend to behave more cautiously in the face of uncertainty.
Q: What is "psychological traffic calming"?
A: Traditional "traffic calming" relies on putting big, visually obvious obstructions in the road, like speed bumps, or the wider, flatter speed humps. Unfortunately, since the bulk of drivers, like tantrum-throwing toddlers, really don t like to be calmed, a lot of these don t work as well as hoped, or produce negative, unintended consequences, like the fact that people will raise their speed between the bumps to make up for the time lost slowing to traverse the bump. So-called "psychological traffic calming" basically tries to calm traffic without drivers even realizing they re being calmed. It does so through things like reducing the width of roads, using pavements of different colors or textures, even removing center-line dividers, which studies have shown is one way to get drivers to slow down. Even creating visual interest along the side of the road, a no-no in traditional traffic engineering because it s a "distraction," can be used to calm traffic when something s worth seeing, after all, people slow down. The most radical approach is removing any signage at all, and forcing drivers to rely on their own wits, as well as the dynamics of human interaction, as has been seen in some interesting experiments in the Netherlands.
Q: You cite 20 miles per hour as the speed at which eye contact becomes impossible. How central to understanding traffic, and human communication generally, is this statistic?
A: Eye contact is a fundamental human signal all kinds of studies have shown, for example, how people are more likely to cooperate with one another when they can make eye contact. When we don t have it, when we become anonymous, we not only lose some of that impulse towards cooperation, we seem to become susceptible to all kinds of behavior we might not otherwise engage in. In most driving situations, of course, we lose eye contact, and have to make do with our rather limited vocabulary of traffic signals. At much slower speeds, however, like those seen in the experimental roundabouts in the Netherlands were most signage has been stripped away, it is fascinating to see how intricately all the traffic can interweave exactly because some of those human signals have been restored.
Q: We ve all had the experience of the annoying passenger who can t stop critiquing our driving when we know are driving just perfectly. Then again, we ve all been the back seat driver to people who think they are driving perfectly when we know for sure they are about to kill us. What accounts for the way drivers vs. passengers experience the same ride?
A: First of all, I should stress that passengers, even annoying back-seat drivers, are good for us: Statistics show that people are less likely to crash when they are accompanied in the car (except, interestingly, teen drivers). But there s several interesting things going on between drivers and passengers. For one, driving as an activity often lacks regular feedback we re often not aware in the moment of how close to a crash we almost came, or our own culpability in that. Secondly, drivers tend to self-enhance. They all tend to think they are better than average, or at least average drivers it s been called the "Lake Woebegone Effect." Passengers are not caught up in this dynamic there s no such thing as a "better than average" passenger nor do they feel themselves joined to the mechanics of the car, the way a driver does. Brain scans of people doing simulated driving have even revealed different results from people acting as simulated passengers. In the end, a back-seat driver, like it or not, is providing feedback, the same way someone can view footage of their golf swing to learn what they couldn t see in the moment.
Q: You talk about numerous experiments going on around the world to study traffic, what are some of the ones that you found most interesting?
A: One of the most fascinating things that is happening, thanks to technology like TiVo style cameras and feedback sensors, is that researchers are becoming increasingly able to study how drivers really behave on the road, learning curious details about, for example, how much time drivers spend looking in certain places forward at the road, in the rear-view mirrors, away from traffic, at the radio, etc. With companies like DriveCam, this information is actually being used to coach drivers beginners but also experienced drivers based on the crashes they narrowly avoided. The work of Hans Monderman, who unfortunately died in January, in the Netherlands was also utterly fascinating. Faced with a visually unappealing, traffic clogged intersection in the heart of the Dutch city of Drachten, Monderman turned it into a roundabout, with fountains and plantings but no traffic lights and virtually no signage the result, more than a year later, is the traffic moves more efficiently through the town, and there have been fewer crashes. It was also quite memorable to be in Los Angeles "traffic bunker" on Oscar Night. They set up special traffic patterns so that the stars limos can all get to the red carpet at roughly the same time. It was striking to see how one person, sitting alone at a computer screen, can orchestrate the whole city s flows, its competing patterns of desire.
Q: You have been all over the world studying traffic. So, where was it the worst and how does the city in which we live dictate our highway behavior?
A: It depends on how you define worst! I ve been in nasty jams from Seoul to San Francisco. The places that felt the most chaotic were cities like Hanoi, which currently has the highest level of motorbikes per capita in the world, and where, in many parts of the city, the only way one can cross the street is by simply wading into the flow. New Delhi was also quite unnerving, not just for the hustle and bustle of so many modes of transportation on the road at once, but the chronic disobedience of traffic rules. In Beijing, where "driver" not that long ago was only the title of a job, driving was hectic but I found it quite difficult as well to be a pedestrian drivers were always plunging into the crosswalks when I had the "walk" man, I was always having to climb bridges or submerge into tunnels to cross streets, and the city s "super-blocks" are sort of oppressive I walk quickly but it took me nearly an hour to walk around the block on which my hotel was located.
I think traffic behavior is dictated by a complicated mix of cultural factors and the traffic engineering measures in place. In Copenhagen, home of the world s largest anarchist community, people on foot are astonishingly law-abiding in terms of not crossing against the light. In New York, an arguably more individualistic, ego-driven sort of place, you re viewed as a tourist if you don t jaywalk. But in London, for example, studies have shown that the number of pedestrians who violate red lights literally changes with each block; it s not that those people s culture changed from one block to the next, it was simply that some lights were too punishingly long to wait for.
Q: You seem to feel pretty strongly about what constitutes an "accident" on the road. While drugs and alcohol are called out as criminal, cell phone use, texting and general disregard for traffic laws are not. Do you think we are heading toward stricter laws on this front? Should we?
A: Since the car was invented, drivers have been reluctant to give up what they see as their "rights," even as these supposed rights keep changing. This is why, for example, cars are sold without "speed governors," a device that would greatly reduce, if not eliminate, the illegal let s call it what it is act of speeding, and certainly reduce fatalities and injuries. It took years for people to accept that drinking and then getting behind the wheel was not a good idea, and obviously many still do think it s acceptable. As the science emerges that cell phone conversations, not simply dialing, can seriously impair a driver s attention and reaction times, the very reasons we criminalize drunken driving, I m not sure what the distinction is that should be made if a driver kills a pedestrian while drunk versus while on their cell phone, or for that matter who kills a pedestrian because they were driving 25 miles over the speed limit. Does one get years in jail and the other a slap on the wrist? Don t they both show an equal disregard for the law? People are leery of imposing stricter laws on negligent driving because it s always been viewed as a "folk crime," like fudging your taxes, sort of widespread and not as serious as others. People are reluctant to criminalize what they see as "normal" behavior. But how did it become normal behavior? When I got my driver s license, the cell phone hadn t been invented, and somehow as a society we managed to get along. The economy didn t collapse, and, if you believe surveys, people were no less happy then they are now. No one wants to get into an accident, they re certainly not premeditated, but were people doing everything they reasonably could to avoid an "accidental" crash when it later turns out they were talking on a cell phone while driving? It s something we re going to have wrestle with as a society as the science really begins to come in.
Q: What is "a forgiving road"?
A: This is a school of thought that says, drivers are only human, they re going to make mistakes, so let s build things so that if they do make a mistake, they won t be seriously injured or killed. Sounds good in theory, and in some places, it s good practice. If you re cruising along the highway at 75 mph and your tire blows out, wouldn t you want a guardrail to prevent you from crashing into a tree? The problem is: Where do you draw the line? The early traffic engineers thought the forgiving road was such a good idea they argued it should be extended to every road in the country. Even residential streets, they argued, shouldn t be lined with trees, and instead should have massive "clear zones" for people to skid off into without killing themselves. The problem, apart from the fact that forgiving roads don t really make for nice residential or city environments, is that the forgiving road principles, can, in effect, give permission to drivers to drive more recklessly, which is not good for other drivers, pedestrians, or cyclists and often not good for them. Just as the only safe car is the one that never leaves the garage, the only truly safe road is the one that s never driven. Trying to make roads "too safe" for drivers leads to all sorts of unintended consequences.
Q: You write that "as the inner life of the driver begins to come into focus, it is becoming clear not only that distraction is the single biggest problem on the road, but that we have little concept of just how distracted we are." Can you explain?
A: To give you an idea, I took a test on a driving simulator. I was doing a kind of logic exercise via a hands-free phone while I drove on the highway. I smacked into the back of a truck. When I looked at the software that tracked my eye movements, they were locked onto the back of that truck. Did I realize how distracted I was? Not at all. Think of when you zone out as someone s talking to you. You re only made aware of it when they ask if you re listening to them. Or take the famous "gorilla video" experiment. You re trying to pay attention to people passing the basketball to each other. In the meantime, a guy in a gorilla suit strolls by. Most people don t see it. You re distracted from the gorilla by the act of counting passes, but you ve no idea. This kind of thing, scarily, happens in driving all the time. There are times we know we re distracted in some way, like physically dialing a phone, but other times when we re not aware of the extent of our distraction because we think we re paying attention.
Q: You write about the cars and technologies of the future and as you put it, "It is probably no accident that whenever one hears of a "smart" technology, it refers to something that has been taken out of human control." Are we headed towards the driverless automobile?
A: We re definitely already in the era of "driver-assist" automobiles, with blind-spot warnings and adaptive cruise control and the like. As people who study automation have noted, these "semiautomated" processes come with very particular challenges drivers may relax their vigilance, thinking everything is fine thanks to the car s technology, but something might happen that actually confounds the car s systems, and suddenly the driver is "out of the loop." This kind of thing has been seen in airline crashes. That said, were it to be fully achievable, full automated driving would have all kinds of benefits, from smoother traffic flow to a reduction in crashes. But that s a ways away the legal issues, for one, are massive but maybe by 2050, like in the film Minority Report, we ll all have little autonomous pods connected to a grid
Q: If you had to choose from the vast array of prescriptions, what would be some of the top things you would recommend to make our roads safer and our traffic less maddening?
A: 1. Pay attention to the task at hand. You are operating heavy machinery, not driving a big phone booth or a make-up mirror. Every glance away from the road, every phone call, every fumbling for your last McNugget, not only disrupts traffic flow, it boosts the risk for a crash, which is itself one of the leading causes of congestion. Even though we often read about how much money we re losing because of traffic congestion, which people often site as reason to build more roads, it s been estimated that crashes cost us more in economic terms than congestion itself.
2. Remember the ants. Army ants are among the world s best commuters, for a single reason: They re all cooperating. They move in unison, they help each other out, the individual doesn t consider his own interests above that of the traffic stream. We all want to assert our individuality, or our sense of superiority on the road, but as everyone does that, it makes it worse for everyone else, and the whole system gets worse.
3. Keep in mind you re not as good a driver as you think you are. On the road, we re moving faster than our evolutionary history has prepared us. We cope pretty well regardless, but we re still susceptible to all kinds of flaws and distortions in our sensory and decision-making equipment. Just because your eyes are on the road and your hands upon the wheel doesn t mean you re actually prepared to deal with an emergency.
4. We can t build our way out of traffic, but we can think our way out. Building more roads when they re already under-funded doesn t seem workable, and given that most roads are only congested part of the time, it s not really the most efficient solution anyway, for loads of reasons. As a former Disney engineer told me when I asked why they didn t just build more rides instead of worrying about new ways to manage the long queues, "you don t build a church for Easter Sunday." But being able to clear a stalled car quickly because sensors detect the traffic flow has changed, knowing which routes are crowded in that moment, and possibly charging accordingly; or, perhaps, making traffic lights adapt to changing demand or getting rid of traffic lights altogether there s countless innovative solutions out there that are more sophisticated, and more sustainable,than simply laying more asphalt, and that don t necessarily involve not driving though that of course is the ultimate traffic solution.
Q: Okay so the big question. We know you have learned a lot about traffic but what have you learned about we humans behind the wheels?
A: In a word, that we re human! We make mistakes, we misjudge our abilities, we re not as aware of what s happening in traffic as we think we are, we act differently in different situations, we get angry over things that matter little in the long run, we re susceptible to distortions in our sense of time, we have trouble living beyond the moment, of seeing the big picture oh, and also, that everyone has a different opinion on who the worst drivers are and where they live "Los Angeles! L.A. drivers are the worst No, Atlanta has terrible drivers No way, Boston drivers are nuts " Try this with your friends sometime.
Product Description
Would you be surprised that road rage can be good for society? Or that most crashes happen on sunny, dry days? That our minds can trick us into thinking the next lane is moving faster? Or that you can gauge a nation’s driving behavior by its levels of corruption? These are only a few of the remarkable dynamics that Tom Vanderbilt explores in this fascinating tour through the mysteries of the road.
Based on exhaustive research and interviews with driving experts and traffic officials around the globe, Traffic gets under the hood of the everyday activity of driving to uncover the surprisingly complex web of physical, psychological, and technical factors that explain how traffic works, why we drive the way we do, and what our driving says about us. Vanderbilt examines the perceptual limits and cognitive underpinnings that make us worse drivers than we think we are. He demonstrates why plans to protect pedestrians from cars often lead to more accidents. He shows how roundabouts, which can feel dangerous and chaotic, actually make roads safer—and reduce traffic in the bargain. He uncovers who is more likely to honk at whom, and why. He explains why traffic jams form, outlines the unintended consequences of our quest for safety, and even identifies the most common mistake drivers make in parking lots.
The car has long been a central part of American life; whether we see it as a symbol of freedom or a symptom of sprawl, we define ourselves by what and how we drive. As Vanderbilt shows, driving is a provocatively revealing prism for examining how our minds work and the ways in which we interact with one another. Ultimately, Traffic is about more than driving: it’s about human nature. This book will change the way we see ourselves and the world around us. And who knows? It may even make us better drivers.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 49 more reviews...
 Driven to distraction July 31, 2008
Julie Neal (Sanibel Island, Fla.)
41 out of 57 found this review helpful
This is an interesting book from cover to cover. Its breezy writing makes it an easy read. Author Tom Vanderbilt's research is exhaustive and impressive. Anyone reading Traffic will learn maybe more than they want about human nature. It changed me from an early merger to a late one. From here on out, I'm ignoring those dirty looks. It just means the drivers haven't read this book yet.
Why do people behave they way they do when they drive? The reasons are complex and fascinating. This book examines the history of driving, traffic in other countries, bumperstickers, the physiology of driving and much, much more. Vanderbilt includes references as varied as Cheers, Crash, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, The Matrix, Seinfeld and the 1950 Walt Disney short Motor Mania.
Traffic explores non-automotive traffic dilemmas as well. Disney has had to manage the flow of people at its theme parks since they opened Disneyland in the 1950s. Sometimes the solutions are counterintuitive. Disney learned that REMOVING one of its monorails instead of adding one actually increases the speed people can travel to the park. This is because each train has a buffer zone in front of it, for safety; as a monorail nears another one, it has to slow down or stop. Taking a train out means they all move faster.
Vanderbilt calls the FastPass system at the Disney parks the "ultimate solution" in managing traffic to the most popular rides. "Rather than waiting in line, the user waits in a 'virtual queue,' in time rather than space, and can in the meantime move on to other, less crowded rides." I can vouch for the FastPass system myself as a Disney travel guide writer; I never, ever wait in line for the big rides. FastPass has changed the way people can experience Disney parks.
The clever cover shows a squiggly arrow traffic sign that has been coated to be reflective, like a real traffic sign is. Under the dust jacket the book is black with a yellow spine.
Here's the chapter list:
Prologue: Why I Became a Late Merger (and Why You Should Too)
1. Why Does the Other Lane Always Seem Faster? How Traffic Messes with Our Heads
* Shut Up, I Can't Hear You: Anonymity, Aggression, and the Problems of Communicating While Driving
* Are You Lookin' at Me? Eye Contact, Stereotypes, and Social Interaction on the Road
* Waiting in Line, Waiting in Traffic: Why the Other Lane Always Moves Faster
* Postscript: And Now, the Secrets of Late Merging Revealed
2. Why You're Not as Good a Driver as You Think You Are
* If Driving Is So Easy, Why Is It So Hard for a Robot? What Teaching Machines to Drive Teaches Us About Driving
* How's My Driving? How the Hell Should I Know? Why Lack of Feedback Fails Us on the Road
3. How Our Eyes and Minds Betray Us on the Road
* Keep Your Mind on the Road: Why It's So Hard to Pay Attention in Traffic
* Objects in Traffic Are More Complicated Than They Appear: How Our Driving Eyes Deceive Us
4. Why Ants Don't Get into Traffic Jams (and Humans Do): On Cooperation as a Cure for Congestion
* Meet the World's Best Commuter: What We Can Learn from Ants, Locusts, and Crickets
* Playing God In Los Angeles
* When Slower Is Faster, or How the Few Defeat the Many: Traffic Flow and Human Nature
5. Why Women Cause More Congestion Than Men (and Other Secrets of Traffic)
* Who Are All These People? The Psychology of Commuting
* The Parking Problem: Why We Are Inefficient Parkers and How This Causes Congestion
6. Why More Roads Lead to More Traffic (and What to Do About It)
* The Selfish Commuter
* A Few Mickey Mouse Solutions to the Traffic Problem
7. When Dangerous Roads are Safer
* The Highway Conundrum: How Drivers Adapt to the Road They See
* The Trouble with Traffic Signs -- and How Getting Rid of Them Can Make Things Better for Everyone
* Forgiving Roads or Permissive Roads? The Fatal Flaws of Traffic Engineering
8. How Traffic Explains the World: On Driving with a Local Accent
* "Good Brakes, Good Horn, Good Luck": Plunging into the Maelstrom of Delhi Traffic
* Why New Yorkers Jaywalk (and Why They Don't in Copenhagen): Traffic as Culture
* Danger: Corruption Ahead -- the Secret Indicator of Crazy Traffic
9. Why You Shouldn't Drive with a Beer-Drinking Divorced Doctor Named Fred on Super Bowl Sunday in a Pickup Truck in Rural Montana: What's Risky on the Road and Why
* Semiconscious Fear: How We Misunderstand the Risks of the Road
* Should I Stay or Should I Go? Why Risk on the Road Is So Complicated
* The Risks of Safety
Epilogue: Driving Lessons
Amazing book! September 29, 2008
C. Perkins (New Jersey)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Living in New Jersey, traffic capital of the USA, this book really hit home. Loved it!
Inside the Driver's Brain August 29, 2008
takingadayoff (Las Vegas, Nevada)
12 out of 16 found this review helpful
Driving, at least in America, is an activity that is oddly personal. Our cars, the way we drive, how we handle bad traffic, are so much a part of ourselves, that we bristle, or worse, when someone criticizes our choice of car, the way we drive, or our behavior in traffic.
When I read several (professional) reviews of Traffic, it was hard to believe that they were all about the same book. The reviews seemed to reflect the personalities, the insecurities, the preferences of the reviewers. I was learning more about the reviewers than about the book. Then when I'd read the book, I found that the parts that stuck with me had not been mentioned in any of the reviews I'd seen.
For instance, I was fascinated to read about "Sabbath Timing" of traffic lights at some 75 Los Angeles intersections. From sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday every week, and on certain holidays, they are programmed to flash the walk signal every signal rotation, whether anyone presses the button or not. This is so the orthodox Jews in those neighborhoods cross the streets without pressing the button, which would be against the rule not to use any machines. The city planners considered an alternate solution that would use sensors to detect if a pedestrian was waiting to cross the street, but consultations with local rabbis determined that that would not be in keeping with the restriction.
Another tidbit: all drivers believe they are better than average. Not surprising actually, but still interesting.
A factoid that applies to more than just traffic: most people prefer one long line rather than many short lines, such as that at Wendy's vs. the lines at McDonald's, even if the wait is longer with the long line. We like the "social justice" of the single line, in which no one can pick the "right" line and be served ahead of those who waited longer in the slower lines.
Traffic is a thoroughly-researched book with lots of data and over a hundred pages of end notes and index. Vanderbilt knows his traffic. But so do we. So here are my own observations about traffic.
I spent many years commuting to work in the Bay Area, a 140-mile round trip, on several different shifts, and including right after the Loma Prieta Earthquake, when the Bay Bridge, a critical portion of my commute, was being repaired after a large section fell into the Bay. In all the years spent commuting, the traffic did not strike me as being especially idiosyncratic. It was awful and I hated it, but it seemed no worse or better than most places.
Las Vegas, on the other hand, is a different kettle of fish. The drivers here have a real "double or nothing" mentality. I quickly learned to hurry through all yellow lights and to check the rear view mirror before stopping at red lights. The alternative was to be rear-ended.
Avoid the temptation (difficult in Las Vegas) to make quick starts when the light turns green. Wait for at least two more cars to go through the intersection and check to see if anyone else is going to run the red. Then go. Jaywalking is very common, and so are accidents resulting from jaywalking.
In spite of all this, I continue to be surprised that school zone speed limits are religiously observed. Even at the school zone on a main street that covers several blocks, the traffic slows to 15 mph and no one cheats. I never see any police cars skulking in the vicinity, so I can't explain this apparent anomaly. The substandard school system seems to rule out the possibility that Las Vegans care more about the welfare of their children than do other communities. It's just one of those local quirks, I guess.
The first time we went to Rome, I fell in love. With the traffic. It was wild, uncontrolled, anarchic, insane! After a few minutes, it seemed less so. In fact, it was beautiful. Everyone was moving in a synchronized way, ignoring signs, signals, crosswalks, but completely aware of the other cars and the pedestrians. Unlike in North America, the Romans did not come to a stop unless absolutely necessary, and then for as short a time as possible. We learned, as every visitor to Rome does, that pedestrians wait for a small break in the traffic, stride confidently into the street, making eye contact or appearing stylishly aloof, your choice, but moving at a constant pace across the street. Traffic will slow slightly, move around you, and you will be incorporated into the flow. You must do what is expected, no sudden moves, no stopping in the middle of the street.
Yes, most of the drivers are driving one-handed, telefonino in the other hand. But they are all aware of the traffic around them. Here, we stare straight ahead in our individual cocoons, passive-aggressively making the other guy go around us when we refuse to acknowledge his presence.
Traffic is the perfect book to listen to while in traffic.
Brilliant overview of a previously untouched subject September 28, 2008
Bradley M. Allan
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
In "Traffic," Mr. Vanderbilt has done what every non-fiction writer worth her salt aims to achieve: systematically yet carefully describing an entrenched and common subject in a fresh and enlightening way. And he does so with a gusto and enthusiasm for research in a variety of fields that is, for my money, nearly unmatched in the culture today.
Amazon's extensive interview with Mr. Vanderbilt (not to mention his own Amazon blog) provides an excellent overview of the book and its many "eureka!" moments (which you will feel compelled to read aloud to all those within earshot as you work through the lively narrative), so I will not attempt any sort of summary here. Suffice it to say that Mr. Vanderbilt covers a lot of ground: the costs, designs, modifications, and current ideas of the many industries that have a stake in Traffic, as well as the economic, social, psychological, and cultural implications of these myriad aspects.
Anyone that wishes to delve below the superficial levels of an activity and institution that we as a society have come to take for granted should read this book. It is not only well-written, comprehensive, endlessly fascinating, and breathtakingly researched, it is decidedly normative as well, and drivers of all kinds will pick up more than a few helpful tips in how to be safer, more courteous, and more aware on the road.
I didn't know that! August 26, 2008
Phelps Gates (Chapel Hill, NC USA)
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
A fascinating book! Every page is full of interesting things I didn't know (and never thought to ask). What sort of "safety features" actually make driving more dangerous? Why does the Los Angeles traffic control system take account of the Hebrew calendar? How do cows function as mental speed bumps in Delhi? What feature do left turners share in Pittsburg and Beijing? Reading it will give you a whole new slant on something most of us do every day.
It's easy to read and endlessly fascinating. I finished the book in a few hours, unable to tear myself away. One caveat, which another reviewer has mentioned: there are about 100 pages of notes, mostly bibliography but with a few interesting nuggets concealed... be sure to skim the notes at least once per chapter. It might have been nice to have some of these as bottom-of-the-page footnotes.
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