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Tom Vanderbilt

Traffic Kindle Edition

by Tom Vanderbilt (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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A New York Times Notable Book

One of the Best Books of the Year
The Washington Post • The Cleveland Plain-Dealer • Rocky Mountain News

In this brilliant, lively, and eye-opening investigation, Tom 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 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.Traffic is about more than driving: it's about human nature. It will change the way we see ourselves and the world around us, and it may even make us better drivers.

Print length

418 pages
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English
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Vintage
Publication date

July 29, 2008
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A surprising, enlightening look at the psychology of human beings behind the steering wheels . . . Required reading for anyone applying for a driver's license.” —The New York Times Book Review“Engagingly written, meticulously researched, endlessly interesting and informative.” —The Washington Post Book World“Smart and comprehensive. . . . Vanderbilt's book is likely to remain relevant well into the new century.” —The New Republic“Traffic will definitely change the way you think about driving, which also means changing the way you think about being human.”—Slate“Fascinating, surprising . . . Vanderbilt’s book will be a revelation not just to us drivers but also, one might guess, to our policy makers.”–Alan Moores, The Seattle Times“An engaging, informative, psychologically savvy account of the conscious and unconscious assumptions of individual drivers.... Full of fascinating facts and provocative propositions.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette“An engrossing tour through the neuroscience of highway illusions, the psychology of late merging, and other existential driving dilemmas.”—Discover“Manages to be downright fun.”—Road and Track“Smart and comprehensive . . . A shrewd tour of the much-experienced but little-understood world of driving . . . A balanced and instructive discussion on how to improve our policies toward the inexorable car . . . Vanderbilt’s book is likely to remain relevant well into the new century.”—Edward L. Glaeser, The New Republic“A delightful tour through the mysteries and manners of driving.”—Tony Dokoupil, Newsweek“A breezy . . . well-researched . . . examination of the strange interaction of humanity and multiton metal boxes that can roar along at . . . 60 m.p.h. or sit for hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic....

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.

About the Author

Tom Vanderbilt writes about design, technology, science and culture for Wired, Slate, The New York Times and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn and drives a 2001 Volvo V40.

From the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic — engagingly written, meticulously researched, endlessly interesting and informative — is one of those rare books that comes out of the depths of nowhere. Its subjects are the road and the people who drive it, which is to say Traffic gets about as close to the heart of modern existence as any book could get, yet what's truly astonishing is that no one else has done it, at least not on the scale that Vanderbilt has achieved. We've had road novels (On the Road) and road movies ("Two for the Road") and road songs ("On the Road Again"), but nonfiction studies of "why we drive the way we do and what it says about us" — to borrow Vanderbilt's subtitle -- have been almost entirely limited to dry, impenetrable engineering and psychological treatises. Yet think about it, which Vanderbilt obviously has done at great length and to immensely rewarding effect. "Many of us," he writes at the outset, "myself included, seem to take driving a car fairly lightly, perhaps holding on to some simple myths of independence and power, but it is actually an incredibly complex and demanding task." Then, a bit farther down the road, at the beginning of a chapter entitled "Why You're Not as Good a Driver as You Think You Are," he continues:

"For those of us who are not brain surgeons, driving is probably the most complex everyday thing we do. It is a skill that consists of at least fifteen hundred 'subskills.' At any moment, we are navigating through terrain, scanning our environment for hazards and information, maintaining our position on the road, judging speed, making decisions (about twenty per mile, one study found), evaluating risk, adjusting instruments, anticipating the future actions of others -- even as we may be sipping a latte, thinking about last night's episode of American Idol, quieting a toddler, or checking voice mail. A survey of one stretch of road in Maryland found that a piece of information was presented every two feet, which at 30 miles per hour, the study reasoned, meant the driver was exposed to 1,320 'items of information,' or roughly 440 words, per minute. This is akin to reading three paragraphs like this one while also looking at lots of pretty pictures, not to mention doing all the other things mentioned above -- and then repeating the cycle, every minute you drive."

Get only a few pages into Traffic and you'll begin to understand something that probably has never crossed your mind, unless you're a traffic engineer, a behavioral psychologist or a law-enforcement officer: The road is an incredibly complicated place, and driving -- which, after the initial rush of passing the driver's test, most of us take for granted for the rest of our lives -- is fraught with danger and uncertainty at every turn of the wheels. Vanderbilt, a freelance writer who specializes in complex and sometimes arcane subjects, posits "a simple mantra you can carry about with you in traffic": "When a situation feels dangerous to you, it's probably more safe than you know; when a situation feels safe, that is precisely when you should feel on guard. Most crashes, after all, happen on dry roads, on clear, sunny days, to sober drivers."

By way of illustrating the point, Vanderbilt describes "a driving trip in rural Spain" during which a promising shortcut turned out to be "a climbing, twisting, broken-asphalt nightmare of blind hairpin turns" with "few guardrails, just vertigo-inducing drops into distant gulleys." Because "there was little to keep me from tumbling off the edge of the road," Vanderbilt "drove as if my life depended on it," which of course it did. Another time in Spain, he drove "a smooth, flat road with gentle curves and plenty of visibility," and "I just about fell asleep and ran off the road."

By any standard measurement, the first road was "incredibly dangerous" and the second "of course the more objectively safe," yet Vanderbilt argues -- and many traffic specialists agree -- that the first road made him a better driver because it put him on high alert while the second nearly lulled him to sleep. He writes: "The things that work best in the traffic world of the highway -- consistency, uniformity, wide lanes, knowing what to expect ahead of time, the reduction of conflicts, the restriction of access, and the removal of obstacles -- have little or no place in the social world."

That's just one of the many useful tidbits that await you in Traffic. For instance: "Anonymity in traffic acts as a powerful drug, with several curious side effects. On the one hand, because we feel that no one is watching, or that no one we know will see us, the inside of the car itself becomes a useful place for self-expression. . . . The flip side of anonymity . . . is that it encourages aggression." The risks of anonymity are among the almost literally uncountable distractions of the road: "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." People "drive as if the world is a television show viewed on TiVo that can be paused in real time -- one can duck out for a moment, grab a beer from the fridge, and come back to right where they left off without missing a beat."

Keeping traffic moving safely and freely is the responsibility of traffic engineers, yet most of us are clueless about their daily impact on our lives. They are involved in everything from synchronizing (or not synchronizing) stoplights to building gentle curves into straight interstates in order to reduce boredom and sleepiness. But they aren't perfect: "As a profession, traffic engineering has historically tended to treat pedestrians like little bits of irritating sand gumming up the works of their smoothly humming traffic machines. With a touch of condescending pity, pedestrians are referred to as 'vulnerable road users.' . . . As a testament to the inherent bias of the profession, no engineer has ever written a paper about how 'vehicular interference' disrupts the saturation flow rates of people trying to cross the street."

One of Vanderbilt's best chapters is "How Traffic Explains the World: On Driving with a Local Accent," in which he shows how everything from road signs to motorists' behavior varies from city to city, country to country. It's not all that hard for the traveler to adapt to the basics, as I discovered a couple of years ago while driving on the "wrong" side of the road in Scotland, but the subtleties are something else: "Traffic is a sort of secret window onto the inner heart of a place, a form of cultural expression as vital as language, dress, or music. It's the reason a horn in Rome does not mean the same thing as a horn in Stockholm, why flashing your headlights at another driver is understood one way on the German autobahn and quite another way on the 405 in Los Angeles, why people jaywalk constantly in New York and hardly at all in Copenhagen. These are the impressions that stick with us. 'Greek drivers are crazy,' the visitor to Athens will observe, safely back in Kabul."

As for accidents, Vanderbilt declines to call them that as they are almost always the result of behavior that is not accidental. He calls them crashes, and reports that "more people were killed in the United States on Saturday and Sunday from midnight to three a.m. than all those who were killed from midnight to three a.m. the rest of the week." Stay home on the Fourth of July, "statistically, the most dangerous day to be on the road," and Super Bowl Sunday: "Nearly twenty times more beer is drunk in total on Super Bowl Sunday than on an average day." The drivers most likely to be involved in crashes on those days are males, frequently young ones, especially those driving pickup trucks, "the most dangerous vehicle on the road." Indeed, pickups are more dangerous than big trucks, because "car drivers have less to fear from [big] trucks than from what they themselves do around [big] trucks," which tends to be to drive dangerously. Pickups "are high, heavy, and have very stiff front ends -- meaning other vehicles have to absorb more energy in a crash."

All the above is just a sample of what's to be learned from Traffic, which touches just about every imaginable base, always authoritatively. As a Washingtonian who is both a motorist and (more often) a pedestrian, I wish he'd looked into the tendency of suburbanites to bring bad suburban driving habits into more demanding urban streets -- yes, Maryland and Virginia license plates, I'm talking about you -- but that can be inferred from other discussions in the book. Read it and you're likely to come away a better driver, more cautious and more alert. Certainly I like to think it's made me a better driver, but then as Vanderbilt says, we all think we're better drivers than we really are.

From Publishers Weekly

Vanderbilt looks at the psychology of driving and the many false impressions drivers use to operate their vehicles. He also looks at other subjects potentially unconsidered by the average driver, such as traffic control centers and smart technology that improves driving decisions. David Slavin's diverse application of tone and personality make him a great choice for this production. Vanderbilt's writing is accessible, but it changes in tone depending on the context (ranging from life-and-death issues of accidents to reflecting about traffic controllers protesting during the Academy Awards). Slavin balances these shifting thoughts and maintains an overall energetic personality throughout the production. The big challenge of this audiobook is how much drivers who listen to audiobooks will adjust their habits while listening to it. A Knopf hardcover. (Reviews, May 19).
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Tom Vanderbilt has an eye for identifying the extraordinary in the mundane. In the well-received Traffic, the autophile’s equivalent to Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, the author offers fresh insight into the annoying—and, Vanderbilt makes clear, quite dangerous—world of traffic. “Get only a few pages into Traffic,” the Washington Post writes, “and you’ll begin to understand something that probably has never crossed your mind, unless you’re a traffic engineer, a behavioral psychologist or a law-enforcement officer.” An insider’s look at how car culture is shaped by human nature, even if the Los Angeles Times reviewer criticized Vanderbilt’s omission of our collective car fetish, Traffic is an engaging read for every driver—from the 10-and-2 to the habitual gawker.
Copyright 2008 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Why I Became a Late Merger
(and Why You Should Too)

Why does the other lane always seem to be moving faster?

It is a question you have no doubt asked yourself while crawling down some choked highway, watching with mounting frustration as the adjacent cars glide ahead. You drum the wheel with your fingers. You change the radio station. You fixate on one car as a benchmark of your own lack of progress. You try to figure out what that weird button next to the rearwindow
defroster actually does.

I used to think this was just part of the natural randomness of the highway. Sometimes fate would steer me into the faster lane, sometimes it would relinquish me to the slow lane.

That was until recently, when I had an experience that made me rethink my traditionally passive outlook on the road, and upset the careful set of assumptions that had always guided my behavior in traffic.

I made a major lifestyle change. I became a late merger.

Chances are, at some point you have found yourself driving along the highway when a sign announces that the left lane, in which you are traveling, will close one mile ahead, and that you must merge right.

You notice an opening in the right lane and quickly move over. You breathe a sigh, happy to be safely ensconced in the Lane That Will Not End. Then, as the lane creeps to a slow halt, you notice with rising indignation that cars in the lane you have vacated are continuing to speed ahead, out of sight. You quietly seethe and contemplate returning to the much faster left lane--if only you could work an opening. You grimly accept your condition.

One day, not long ago, I had an epiphany on a New Jersey highway. I was having a typical white-knuckle drive among the scenic oil-storage depots and chemical-processing plants of northern Jersey when suddenly, on the approach to the Pulaski Skyway, the sign loomed: LANE ENDS ONE MILE. MERGE RIGHT.

Seized by some rash impulse, I avoided the instinctual tickle at the back of my brain telling me to get in the already crowded right lane. Just do what the sign says, that voice usually counsels. Instead, I listened to another, more insistent voice: Don't be a sucker. You can do better. I plowed purposefully ahead, oblivious to the hostile stares of other drivers. From the corner of my eye I could see my wife cringing. After passing dozens of cars, I made it to the bottleneck point, where, filled with newfound swagger, I took my rightful turn in the small alternating "zipper" merge that had formed. I merged, and it was clear asphalt ahead. My heart was beating faster. My wife covered her face with her hands.

In the days after, a creeping guilt and confusion took hold. Was I wrong to have done this? Or had I been doing it wrong all my life? Looking for an answer, I posted an anonymous inquiry on Ask MetaFilter, a Web site one can visit to ask random questions and tap into the "hive mind" of an anonymous audience of overeducated and overopinionated geeks. Why should one lane move faster than the other, I wanted to know, and why are people rewarded for merging at the last possible moment? And was my new lifestyle, that of the late merger, somehow deviant?

I was startled by the torrent of responses, and how quickly they came. What struck me most was the passion and conviction with which people argued their various cases--and the fact that while many people seemed to think I was wrong, almost as many seemed to think I was right. Rather than easy consensus, I had stumbled into a gaping divide of irreconcilable
belief.

The first camp--let us name it after the bumper sticker that says practice random acts of kindness--viewed early mergers as virtuous souls doing the right thing and late mergers as arrogant louts. "Unfortunately, people suck," wrote one Random Acts poster. "They'll try whatever they can to pass you, to better enjoy the traffic jam from a few car lengths ahead of you. . . . People who feel that they have more pressing concerns and are generally more important than you will keep going, and some weak-spined schmuck will let them in further down, slowing your progress even more. This sucks; I'm afraid it's the way of the world."

Another camp, the minority camp-let's call them Live Free or Die, after the license-plate motto of the state of New Hampshire-argued that the late mergers were quite rationally utilizing the highway's maximum capacity, thus making life better for everyone. In their view, the other group's attempts toward politeness and fairness were actually detrimental to all.

It got more complicated. Some argued that late merges caused more accidents. Some said the system worked much better in Germany, and hinted that my dilemma perhaps revealed some national failing in the American character. Some said they were afraid of not being "let in" at the last moment; some said they would actively try to block someone from merging, the way truckers often do. So what was going on here? Are we not all driving the same road, did we not all pass the same driving tests? What was puzzling was not just the variety of responses but the sense of moral righteousness each person attributed to his or her highway behavior, and the vitriol each person reserved for those holding the opposite view. For the most part, people were not citing traffic laws or actual evidence but their own personal sense of what was right.

I even found someone claiming to have had a conversion experience exactly the opposite of mine. "Until very recently, I was a 'late merger,' " wrote the author, an executive with a software company, in a business magazine. Why had he become a born-again early merger? "Because I came to realize that traffic flowed faster the sooner people merged." He used this as a metaphor for successful team building in corporate America, in which "late mergers" were those who consistently put their own opinions and motives above the greater company. "Early mergers," he wrote, could help push companies to their "maximum communal speed." But did traffic flow faster when people merged sooner? Or did it just seem more noble to think that it did?

. . .

You may suspect that getting people to merge in a timely fashion, and without killing one another, is less of a traffic problem and more of a human problem. The road, more than simply a system of regulations and designs, is a place where many millions of us, with only loose parameters for how to behave, are thrown together daily in a kind of massive petri dish in which all kinds of uncharted, little-understood dynamics are at work. There is no other place where so many people from different walks of life--different ages, races, classes, religions, genders, political preferences, lifestyle choices, levels of psychological stability--mingle so freely.

What do we really know about how it all works? Why do we act the way we do on the road, and what might that say about us? Are certain people predisposed to drive certain ways? Do women behave differently than men? And if, as conventional wisdom has it, drivers have become progressively less civil over the past several decades, why is that so? Is the road a microcosm of society, or its own place with its own set of rules? I have a friend, an otherwise timorous Latin teacher, who once told me how, in a modest Toyota Corolla, he had defiantly "stuck it" to the driver of an eighteen-wheeler who he felt was hogging the road. Some mysterious force had turned this gentle suburban scholar into the Travis Bickle of the turnpike. (Are you tailgatin' me?) Was it traffic, or had the beast always been lurking within?

The more you think about it--or, rather, the more time you spend in traffic with time to think about it--the more these sorts of puzzling questions swim to the surface. Why can one sit in traffic jams that seem to have no source? Why does a ten-minute "incident" create one hundred minutes of gridlock? Do people really take longer to vacate a parking spot when someone else is waiting, or does it just seem so? Do the car-pool lanes on highways help fight congestion or cause more of it? Just how dangerous are large trucks? How does what we drive, where we drive, and with whom we drive affect the way we drive? Why do so many New Yorkers jaywalk, while hardly anyone in Copenhagen does? Is New Delhi's traffic as chaotic as it seems, or does a beautiful order lurk beneath the frenzied surface?

Like me, you may have wondered: What could traffic tell us, if someone would just stop to listen?

The first thing you hear is the word itself. Traffic. What did you think of when you read that word? In all likelihood you pictured a crowded highway, filled with people obstructing your progress. It was not a pleasant thought. This is interesting, because for most of its long life the word traffic has had rather positive connotations. It originally referred (and still does) to trade and the movement of goods. That meaning slowly expanded to include the people engaging in that trade and the dealings among people themselves--Shakespeare's prologue to Romeo and Juliet describes the "traffic of our stage." It then came to signify the movement itself, as in the "traffic on this road." At some point, people and things became interchangeable. The movement of goods and people were intertwined in a single enterprise; after all, if one was going somewhere, it was most likely in pursuit of commerce. This is still true today, as most traffic problems occur during the times we are all going to work, but we seem less likely to think of traffic in terms of motion and mobility, as a great river of opportunity, than as something that makes our lives miserable.

Now, like then, we think of traffic as an abstraction, a grouping of things rather than a collection of individuals. We talk about "beating the traffic" or "getting stuck in traffic," but we never talk--in polite company, at least--about "beating people" or "getting stuck in people." The news lumps together "traffic and weather" as if they were both passive forces largely outside our control, even though whenever we complain about it, we do so because we're part of the traffic. (To be fair, I suppose we are now part of the weather as well, thanks to the atmospheric emissions of that same driving.) We say there is "too much traffic" without exactly knowing what we mean. Are we saying there are too many people? Or that there are not enough roads for the people who are there? Or that there is too much affluence, which has enabled too many people to own cars?

One routinely hears of "traffic problems." But what is a traffic problem? To a traffic engineer, a "traffic problem" might mean that a street is running below capacity. For a parent living on that street, the "traffic problem" could be too many cars, or cars going too fast. For the store owner on that same street, a "traffic problem" might mean there is not enough traffic. Blaise Pascal, the renowned seventeenth-century French scientist and philosopher, had perhaps the only foolproof remedy for traffic: Stay home. "I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact," he wrote. "That they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber." Pascal, as it happens, is credited with inventing history's first urban bus service. He died a mere five months later. Was Parisian traffic his undoing?

Whatever "traffic problem" means to you, it may give you some comfort to know that traffic problems of all variety are as old as traffic itself. Ever since humans began to propel themselves artificially, society has struggled to catch up with the implications of mobility, to sort out technical and social responses to the new demands.

Visitors to the ruins of Pompeii, for example, will see rutted streets marked by the tracks of chariot wheels. But many are wide enough for only one set of wheels. The tourist wonders: Was it a one-way street? Did a lowly commoner have to reverse himself out of the way when a member of the imperial legions came trotting along in the other direction? If two chariots arrived at an intersection simultaneously, who went first? These questions were neglected for years, but recent work by the American traffic archaeologist Eric Poehler has provided some answers.

By studying the wear patterns on curbstones at corners, as well as the stepping stones set up for pedestrians to cross the "rutways," Poehler was able to discern not just the direction of traffic but the direction of turns onto two-way streets at intersections. It seems, based on the "directionally diagnostic wear patterns" on the curbstones, that Pompeii drivers drove on the right side of the street (part of a larger cultural preference for righthanded activities), used primarily a system of one-way streets, and were banned from driving on certain streets altogether. There seemed to be no traffic signs or street signs. It may please the reader to know, however, that Pompeii did suffer from its share of road construction and detours (as when the building of baths forced the reversal of the Vico di Mercurio).

In ancient Rome, the chariot traffic grew so intense that Caesar, the self-proclaimed curator viarum, or "director of the great roads," declared a daytime ban on carts and chariots, "except to transport construction materials for the temples of the gods or for other great public works or to take away demolition materials." Carts could enter the city only after three p.m. And yet, as one so often finds in the world of traffic, there is very rarely an action without an equal and opposite reaction. By making it easier for the average Roman to move around during the day, Caesar made it harder for them to sleep at night. The poet Juvenal, sounding like a second-century version of a contemporary Roman complaining about scooter traffic, lamented, "Only if one has a lot of money can one sleep in Rome. The source of the problem lies in the carts passing through the bottlenecks of the curved streets, and the flocks that stop and make so much noise they would prevent . . . even a devil-fish from sleeping."

By the time we get to medieval England, we can see that traffic was still a problem in search of a solution. Towns tried to limit, through laws or tolls, where and when traveling merchants could sell things. Magistrates restricted the entry of "shod carts" into towns because they damaged bridges and roads. In one town, horses were forbidden to drink at the river, as children were often found playing nearby. Speeding became a social problem. The Liber Albus, the rule book of fifteenth-century London, forbade a driver to "drive his cart more quickly when it is unloaded than when it is loaded" (if he did, he would be looking at a forty-pence speeding ticket or, more drastically, "having his body committed to prison at the will of the Mayor").

In 1720, traffic fatalities from "furiously driven" carts and coaches were named the leading cause of death in London (eclipsing fire and "immoderate quaffing"), while commentators decried the "Controversies, Quarreling, and Disturbances" caused by drivers "contesting for the way." Meanwhile, in the New York of 1867, horses were killing an average of four pedestrians a week (a bit higher than today's rate of traffic fatalities, although there were far fewer people and far fewer vehicles). Spooked runaways trampled pedestrians underfoot, "reckless drivers" paid little heed to the 5-mile-an-hour speed limit, and there was little concept of right-of-way. "As matters now stand," the New York Times wrote in 1888, "drivers seem to be legally justified in ignoring crossings and causing [pedestrians] to run or dodge over vehicles when they wish to pass over."

The larger the cities grew, and the more ways people devised to get around those cities, the more complicated traffic became, and the more difficult to manage. Take, for instance, the scene that occurred on lower Broadway in New York City on the afternoon of December 23, 1879, an "extraordinary and unprecedented blockade of traffic" that lasted five hours. Who was in this "nondescript jam," as the New York Times called it? The list is staggering: "single and double teams, double teams with a tandem leader, and four-horse teams; hacks, coupes, trucks, drays, butcher carts, passenger stages, express wagons, grocers' and hucksters' wagons, two-wheeled 'dog carts,' furniture carts and piano trucks, and jewelers' and fancy goods dealers' light delivery wagons, and two or three advertising vans, with flimsy transparent canvas sides to show illumination at night."

Just when it seemed as if things could not get more complicated on the road, along came a novel and controversial machine, the first new form of personal transportation since the days of Caesar's Rome, a newfangled contrivance that upset the fragile balance of traffic. I am talking, of course, about the bicycle. After a couple of false starts, the "bicycle boom" of the late nineteenth century created a social furor. Bicycles were too fast. They threatened their riders with strange ailments, like kyphosis bicyclistarum, or "bicycle stoop." They spooked horses and caused accidents. Fisticuffs were exchanged between cyclists and noncyclists. Cities tried to ban them outright. They were restricted from streets because they were not coaches, and restricted from sidewalks because they were not pedestrians. The bicycle activists of today who argue that cars should not be allowed in places like Brooklyn's Prospect Park were preceded, over a hundred years ago, by "wheelmen" fighting for the right for bicycles to be allowed in that same park. New bicycle etiquette questions were broached: Should men yield the right-of-way to women?

There is a pattern here, from the chariot in Pompeii to the Segway in Seattle. Once humans decided to do anything but walk, once they became "traffic," they had to learn a whole new way of getting around and getting along. What is the road for? Who is the road for? How will these streams of traffic flow together? Before the dust kicked up by the bicycles had even settled, the whole order was toppled again by the automobile, which was beginning to careen down those same "good roads" the cyclists themselves, in a bit of tragic irony, had helped create.

When driving began, it was like a juggernaut, and we have rarely had time to pause and reflect upon the new kind of life that was being made. When the first electric car debuted in mid-nineteenth-century England, the speed limit was hastily set at 4 miles per hour--the speed at which a man carrying a red flag could run ahead of a car entering a town, an event that was still a quite rare occurrence. That man with the red flag racing the car was like a metaphor of traffic itself. It was probably also the last time the automobile existed at anything like human speed or scale. The car was soon to create a world of its own, a world in which humans, separated from everything outside the car but still somehow connected, would move at speeds beyond anything for which their evolutionary history had prepared them.

At first, cars simply joined the chaotic traffic already in the street, where the only real rule of the road in most North American cities was "keep to the right." In 1902, William Phelps Eno, a "well-known yachtsman, clubman, and Yale graduate" who would become known as "the first traffic technician of the whole world," set about untangling the strangling miasma that was New York City's streets. (Deaths by automobile were already, according to the New York Times, "every-day occurrences" with little "news value" unless they involved persons of "exceptional social or business prominence.") Eno was every bit the WASP patrician as social reformer, a familiar character then in New York. He thundered at "the stupidity of drivers, pedestrians and police" and bluntly wielded his favorite maxim: "It is easy to control a trained army but next to impossible to regulate a mob." Eno proposed a series of "radical ordinances" to rein in New York's traffic, a plan that seems hopelessly quaint now, with its instructions on the "right way to turn a corner" and its audacious demands that cars go in only one direction around Columbus Circle. But Eno, who became a global celebrity of sorts, boating off to Paris and São Paulo to solve local traffic problems, was as much a social engineer as a traffic engineer, teaching vast numbers of people to act and communicate in new ways, often against their will.

In the beginning this language was more Tower of Babel than Esperanto. In one town, the blast of a policeman's whistle might mean stop, in another go. A red light indicated one thing here, another thing there.

The first stop signs were yellow, even though many people thought they should be red. As one traffic engineer summed up early-twentieth-century traffic control, "there was a great wave of arrow lenses, purple lenses, lenses with crosses, etc., all giving special instructions to the motorist, who, as a rule, hadn't the faintest idea of what these special indications meant." The systems we take for granted today required years of evolution, and were often steeped in controversy. The first traffic lights had two indications, one for stop and one for go. Then someone proposed a third light, today's "amber phase," so cars would have time to clear the intersection. Some engineers resisted this, on the grounds that vehicles were "amber rushing," or trying to beat the light, which actually made things more dangerous. Others wanted the yellow light shown before the signal was changing to red and before it was changing from red back to green (which one sees today in Denmark, among other places, but nowhere in North America). There were strange regional one-offs that never caught on; for example, a signal at the corner of Wilshire and Western in Los Angeles had a small clock whose hand revealed to the approaching driver
how much "green" or "red" time remained.

Were red and green even the right colors? In 1923 it was pointed out that approximately one in ten people saw only gray when looking at a traffic signal, because of color blindness. Might not blue and yellow, which almost everyone could see, be better? Or would that create catastrophic confusion among all those who had already learned red and green? Despite all the uncertainty, traffic engineering soon hoisted itself onto a wobbly pedestal of authority, even if, as the transportation historian Jeffrey Brown argues, engineers' neutral-sounding Progressive scientific ideology, which compared "curing" congestion to fighting typhoid, reflected the desires of a narrow band of urban elites (i.e., car owners). Thus it was quickly established that the prime objective of a street was simply to move as many cars as quickly as possible--an idea that obscured, as it does to this day, the many other roles of city streets.

After more than a century of tinkering with traffic, plus years of tradition and scientific research, one would think all these issues would have been smoothed out. And they have been, largely. We drive in a landscape that looks virtually the same wherever we go: A red light in Morocco means the same thing as it does in Montana. A walk "man" that moves us across a street in Berlin does the same in Boston, even if the "man" looks a bit different. (The beloved jaunty, hat-clad Ampelmännchen of the former German Democratic Republic has survived the collapse of the Berlin Wall.) We drive on highways that have been so perfectly engineered we forget we are moving at high speeds--indeed, we are sometimes barely aware of moving at all.

For all this standardized sameness, though, there is much that is still simply not known about how to manage the flows of all those people in traffic--drivers, walkers, cyclists, and others--in the safest and most efficient manner. For example, you may have seen, in some cities, a "countdown signal" that indicates, in seconds, exactly how much time you have before the "Walk" signal will change to "Don't Walk." Some people in the traffic world think this innovation has made things better for pedestrians, but it is just as easy to find others who think it offers no improvement at all. Some people think that marked bicycle lanes on streets are the ideal for cyclists, while others prefer separated lanes; still others suggest that maybe having no bicycle lanes at all would be best for bike riders. For a time it was thought that highway traffic would flow better and more safely if trucks were forced to obey a slower speed limit than cars. But "differential speed limits" just seemed to swap out one kind of crash risk for another, with no overall safety benefit, so the "DSLs" were gradually rolled back.

Henry Barnes, the legendary traffic commissioner of New York City in the 1960s, reflecting on his long career in his charmingly titled memoir The Man with the Red and Green Eyes, observed that "traffic was as much an emotional problem as it was a physical and mechanical one." People, he concluded, were tougher to crack than cars. "As time goes on the technical problems become more automatic, while the people problems become more surrealistic."

That "surrealistic" side of traffic will be the focus of this book. I began my research with the intention of stopping to take a look around at an environment that has become so familiar we no longer see it; I wanted to slow down for a moment and think about what's going on out there as we drive, walk, cycle, or find some other way to get around. (Look out for the SKATEBOARD ROUTE signs the next time you're in Portland, Oregon.) My aim was to learn to read between the dotted lines on the highway, sift through the strange patterns that traffic contains, interpret the small feints, dodges, parries, and thrusts between vehicles. I would study not only the traffic signals we obey but also the traffic signals we send.

Many of us, myself included, seem to take driving a car fairly lightly, perhaps holding on to some simple myths of independence and power, but it is actually an incredibly complex and demanding task: We are navigating through a legal system, we are becoming social actors in a spontaneous setting, we are processing a bewildering amount of information, we are constantly making predictions and calculations and on-the-fly judgments of risk and reward, and we're engaging in a huge amount of sensory and cognitive activity--the full scope of which scientists are just beginning to understand.

Much of our mobile life is still shrouded in mystery and murk. We welcome into our vehicles new technologies like cell phones, in-car navigation systems, and "radio display system" radios (which show song titles) before we have had time to understand the complicated effects those devices might have on our driving. Opinion is often divided on the most fundamental aspects of how we should do things. Should hands be at ten a.m. and two p.m. on the steering wheel, as we were once taught--or have air bags made that a dangerous proposition? When changing lanes, is it sufficient to simply signal and check the mirrors? Or should you turn your head and glance over your shoulder? Relying on mirrors alone leaves one open to blind spots, which engineers say can exist on any car (indeed, they almost seemed designed to occur at the most inconvenient and dangerous place, the area just behind and to the left of the driver). But turning your head means not looking forward, perhaps for that vital second. "Head checks are one of the most dangerous things you can do," says the research director of a highway safety agency.

So what do we do? If these issues aren't complicated enough, consider the right side-view mirror itself. In the United States, the driver will notice that their passenger side-view mirror is convex; it usually carries a warning such as "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear." The driver's side mirror is not. In Europe, both mirrors are convex. "What you have today is this clearly pretty wrong situation," says Michael Flannagan, a researcher at the University of Michigan who specializes in driver vision. "It's wrong in the sense that Europe does one thing, the U.S. does another. They can't both be optimal. These are both entrenched traditions, neither of which is fully based on rational, explicit argument." The mirror, as with so many things in traffic, is more complicated than it might appear.

And so we drive around with vague ideas of how things work. Every last one of us is a "traffic expert," but our vision is skewed. We see things only through our own windshields. It is a repeated truism, borne out by insurance company surveys, for example, that most accidents happen very close to home. On first glance, it makes statistical sense: You're likely to take more trips, and spend more time in the car, in your immediate surroundings. But could there be something deeper at work? Habits, psychologists suggest, provide a way to reduce the amount of mental energy that must be expended on routine tasks. Habits also form a mind-set, which gives us cues on how to behave in certain settings. So when we enter a familiar setting, like the streets around our house, habitual behavior takes over. On the one hand, this is efficient: It frees us from having to gather all sorts of new information, from getting sidetracked. Yet on the other hand, because we are expending less energy on analyzing what is around us, we may be letting our mental guard down. If in three years there has never been a car coming out of the Joneses' driveway in the morning, what happens on the first day of the fourth year, when suddenly there is? Will we see it in time? Will we see it at all? Our feeling of safety and control is also a weakness. A study by a group of Israeli researchers found that drivers committed more traffic violations on familiar routes than on unfamiliar routes.

Surely you have had a moment when you were driving down the road and suddenly found yourself "awake at the wheel," unable to remember the last few minutes. In a way, much of the time we spend in traffic is like that, a kind of gauzy dream state of automatic muscle movements and half-remembered images. Traffic is an in-between time in which we are more likely to think about where we are going than where we are at the moment. Time and space are skewed in traffic; our vision is fragmented and often unclear, and we take in and then almost immediately forget hundreds, perhaps thousands of images and impressions. Every minute we are surrounded by a different group of people, people we will share space with but never talk to, never meet.
Considering that many of us may spend more time in traffic than we do eating meals with our family, going on vacation, or having sex, it seems worth probing a bit deeper into the experience. As an American in the early twenty-first century, I live in the most auto-dependent, caradapted, mileage-happy society in the history of the planet. We spend more on driving than on food or health care. As of the last census, there were more cars than citizens. In 1960, hardly any household had three vehicles, and most had only one. Now more own three than own one. Even as the size of the average North American family has fallen over the past several decades, the number of homes with multicar garages has almost doubled--one in five new homes has a three-car garage.

To pay for all that extra space, commute times have also been expanding. One of the fastest-growing categories in the last "commuting census" in the United States was that of "extreme commuters," people who spend upward of two hours a day in traffic (moving or otherwise). Many of these are people pushed farther out by higher home prices, past the billboards that beckon "If you lived here, you'd be home by now," in a phenomenon real estate agents call "drive till you qualify"--in other words, trading miles for mortgage. The average American, as of 2005, spent thirty-eight hours annually stuck in traffic. In 1969, nearly half of American children walked or biked to school; now just 16 percent do. From 1977 to 1995, the number of trips people made on foot dropped by nearly half. This has given rise to a joke: In America, a pedestrian is someone who has just parked their car.

Traffic has become a way of life. The expanding car cup holder, which became fully realized standard equipment only in the 1980s, is now the vital enabler of dashboard dining, a "food and beverage venue" hosting such products as Campbell's Soup at Hand and Yoplait's Go-Gurt. In 2001, there were 134 food products that featured the word go on the label or in ads; by 2004, there were 504. Accordingly, the number of what the industry calls "on-the-go eating occasions" in the United States and Europe combined is predicted to rise from 73.2 billion in 2003 to 84.4 billion in 2008. Fast-food restaurants now clock as much as 70 percent of their sales at drive-through windows. (Early in our romance with the car, we used to go to "drive-in" restaurants, but those now seem relics of a gentler, slower age.) An estimated 22 percent of all restaurant meals are ordered through a car window in America, but other places, like Northern Ireland--where one in eight people are said to eat in the car at least once per week--are getting into the act too. McDonald's has added a second lane to hundreds of its restaurants in the United States in order to speed traffic, and at its new drive-throughs in China, dubbed De Lai Su (for "Come and Get It Fast"), the company is pitching retooled regional offerings like "rice burgers" to its burgeoning drive-through customers. Starbucks, which initially resisted the drive-through for its fast-food connotations, now has drive-throughs at more than half of its new company-owned stores. The "third place" that Starbucks espouses, the place for community and leisure between home and work, is, arguably, the car.

Traffic has even shaped the food we eat. "One-handed convenience" is the mantra, with forkless foods like Taco Bell's hexagonal Crunchwrap Supreme, designed "to handle well in the car." I spent an afternoon in Los Angeles with an advertising executive who had, at the behest of that same restaurant chain, conducted a test, in actual traffic, of which foods were easiest to eat while driving. The main barometer of success or failure was the number of napkins used. But if food does spill, one can simply reach for Tide to Go, a penlike device for "portable stain removal," which can be purchased at one of the more than twelve hundred (and growing) CVS drugstores that feature a drive-through window. The "audiobook," virtually unheard of before the 1980s, represents a business worth $871 million a year, and wouldn't you know it, "traffic congestion" gets prominent mention in sales reports from the Audio Publishers Association. Car commuting is so entrenched in daily life that National Public Radio refers to its most popular segments as "driveway moments," meaning the listener is so riveted to a story they cannot leave their car. In Los Angeles, some synagogues have been forced to change the time of their evening services from eight p.m. to six p.m. in order to capture commuters on their way home, as going home and then returning to services is too much to bear in L.A. traffic. So much time is spent in cars in the United States, studies show, that drivers (particularly men) have higher rates of skin cancer on their left sides--look for the opposite effect in countries where people drive on the left.

Americans have long been fabled for their love of mobility. The nineteenth-century French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of millions "marching at once toward the same horizon," a phrase that springs to mind today when I'm flying over any large city and look at the parallel strings of red and white lights, draped like glittering necklaces over the landscape.

But this is not just a book about North America. While the United States may still have the world's most thoroughgoing car culture, traffic has become a universal condition, inflected with regional accents. In Moscow, the old images of Russians waiting in line have been replaced by images of idling cars stuck in heavy congestion. Ireland has seen its car-ownership rates double since 1990. The once tranquil Tibetan capital of Lhasa now has jams and underground parking garages. In Caracas, Venezuela, traffic is currently ranked "among the world's worst," thanks in part to an oil-fueled economic boom--and in part to cheap gas (as low as seven cents a gallon). In São Paulo, the wealthy shuttle between the city's more than three hundred helipads rather than brave the legendary traffic. In Jakarta, desperate Indonesians work as "car jockeys," hitchhikers of a sort who are paid to help drivers meet the passenger quota for the faster car-pool lanes.

Another traffic-related job has emerged outside Shanghai and other Chinese cities, according to Jian Shou Wang, the head of Kijiji (the eBay of China). There, one can find a new type of worker: Zhiye dailu, or professional road guides, who for a small fee will jump into one's car and provide directions in the unfamiliar city--a human "nav system." But with opportunity comes cost. In China, the number of people being killed on the road every year is now greater than the total number of vehicles the country was manufacturing annually as recently as 1970. By 2020, the World Health Organization predicts, road fatalities will be the world's third-leading cause of death.

We are all traveling the same road, if each in our own peculiar way. I invite you to join me on that road as I try, over the din of passing cars, to hear what traffic has to say.

Review

"A surprising, enlightening look at the psychology of human beings behind the steering wheels.... Jammed with delicious you've-got-to-be kidding moments.... Required reading for anyone applying for a driver's license."
--"The New York Times Book Review"
"Fascinating, surprising . . . Vanderbilt's book will be a revelation not just to us drivers but also, one might guess, to our policy makers."
"-"Alan Moores, "The Seattle Times"
"Traffic gets about as close to the heart of modern existence as any book could get . . . Engagingly written, meticulously researched, endlessly interesting and informative, [it] is one of those rare books that comes out of the depths of nowhere."
"-Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World"
"An engaging, informative, psychologically savvy account of the conscious and unconscious assumptions of individual drivers.... Full of fascinating facts and provocative propositions."
"--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette"
"""An engrossing tour through the neuroscience of highway illusions, the psychology of late merging, and other existential driving dilemmas."
"--Discover"
""Manages to be downright fun.""
"--Road and Track"
"Smart and comprehensive . . . A shrewd tour of the much-experienced but little-understood world of driving . . . A balanced and instructive discussion on how to improve our policies toward the inexorable car . . . Vanderbilt's book is likely to remain relevant well into the new century."
"-"Edward L. Glaeser, T"he New Republic"
"A delightful tour through the mysteries and manners of driving.""-Tony Dokoupil, Newsweek"
"A breezy . . . well-researched . . . examination of the strange interaction ofhumanity and multiton metal boxes that can roar along at . . . 60 m.p.h. or sit for hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic."
"-"Patrick T. Reardon, "Chicago Tribune"
"Traffic will definitely change the way you think about driving, which also means changing the way you think about being human."
-Michael Agger," Slate"
"[A] joyride in the often surprising landscape of traffic science and psychology."
"-"Abigail Tucker, "Smithsonian Magazine"
"""Tom Vanderbilt is one of our best and most interesting writers, with an extraordinary knack for looking at everyday life and explaining, in wonderful and entertaining detail, how it really works. That's never been more true than with Traffic, where he takes a subject that we all deal with (and worry about), and lets us see it through new eyes. In the process, he helps us understand better not just the highway, but the world. It doesn't matter whether you drive or take the bus--you're going to want to read this book."" "
"--James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds"
"A great, deep, multidisciplinary investigation of the dynamics and the psychology of traffic jams. It is fun to read. Anyone who spends more than 19 minutes a day in traffic should read this book."
"--Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author The Black Swan"
"Fascinating, illuminating, and endlessly entertaining as well. Vanderbilt shows how a sophisticated understanding of human behavior can illuminate one of the modern world's most basic and most mysterious endeavors. You'll learn a lot; and the life you save may be your own."
"--Cass R. Sunstein, coauthor of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness"
"Everyone who drives--and manypeople who don't--should read this book. It is a psychology book, a popular science book, and a how-to-save-your-life manual, all rolled into one. I found it gripping and fascinating from the very beginning to the very end."
"--Tyler Cowen, author of Discover Your Inner Economist"
"A well-written, important book that should hold the interest of anyone who drives a car."
"-Dennis Lythgoe, Deseret News"
"An engaging, sociable tour of all things driving-related."
"-Joel Rice, The Tennessean"
"Traffic changes the way you think about driving. For that reason alone, it deserves your attention."
-Dan Danbom, Rocky Mountain News"Intriguing . . . Somehow manages to plunge far more deeply than one would imagine a meditation on travel possibly could. Perhaps without intending to, Vanderbilt has narrowed in on the central question of our time . . . His book asks us to consider how we can persuade human beings to behave more cooperatively than selfishly."
-Elaine Margolin," The Denver Post"
""Vanderbilt investigates . . . complexities with zeal. Surprising details abound.""
"-The New Yorker"
""Fresh and timely . . . Vanderbilt investigates how human nature has shaped traffic, and vice versa, finally answering drivers' most familiar and frustrating questions.""
"--Publishers Weekly"
""Fluently written and oddly entertaining, full of points to ponder while stuck at the on-ramp meter or an endless red light.""
"--Kirkus"
""This may be the most insightful and comprehensive study ever done of driving behavior and how it reveals truths about the types of people we are.""
"--Booklist"
""Tom Vanderbilt uncovers a raft of counterintuitive factsabout what happens when we get behind the wheel, and why.""
"--BusinessWeek"
""Fascinating . . . Could not come at a better time.""
"--Library Journal"
""Brisk . . . Smart . . . Delivers a wealth of automotive insights both curious and counterintuitive.""
"-Details"
""A literate, sobering look at our roadways that explains why the other lane is moving faster and why you should never drive at 1 p.m. on Saturday.""
"--GQ"

""An engrossing tour through the neuroscience of highway illusions, the psychology of late merging, and other existential driving dilemmas.""
"-Michael Mason, Discover"
""Funny . . . Enlightening . . . Want to spend 286 pages having a good time and learning a whole lot about something you do every day for an hour or two? Buy this book.""
"-Ben Wear, Austin American-Statesman"
""I'm very glad I read this book . . . It tells you a lot about traffic. But of course it does more than this. It's really a book about human nature.""
"-William Leith, Evening Standard (UK)"
""A richly extended metaphor for the challenge of organising competing human needs and imperfect human judgment into harmonious coexistence.""
"-Rafael Behr, The Guardian (UK)"
""Automobile traffic is one of the most studied phenomena in advanced societies . . . Mr. Vanderbilt has mastered all of it. Arresting facts appear on every page.""
"-Christopher Caldwell, Financial Times (UK)"

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B001BAGWQE
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; 1st edition (July 29, 2008)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 29, 2008
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1489 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 418 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #670,489 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #449 in Applied Psychology
- #749 in Social Psychology & Interactions
- #1,283 in Popular Applied Psychology

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Tom Vanderbilt

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Tom Vanderbilt writes on design, technology, architecture, science, and many other topics. He is author of "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)" published in 2008 by Alfred A. Knopf, and "Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America," published in 2002 by Princeton Architectural Press. He is contributing editor to I.D. and Print magazines, contributing writer at Design Observer, and writes for many publications, ranging from Wired to the New York Times to Men's Vogue to the Wilson Quarterly. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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Andrew Liptak

Slave to the Traffic Light

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 2, 2009

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Driving is something that I've become very interested in over the past year or so, and something that I've been interested in learning more about. It's very rare that I come across a book that really challenges a lot of the perceptions that I have about something, but Tom Vanderbilt's fantastic examination of driving, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) really did the trick. Traffic looks at, well, Traffic, in all of its numerous and complicated elements, and in doing so, has become a book that is absolutely essential for everyone who gets behind the wheel of an automobile, and even those who come across a road with any regularity. Vanderbilt has put together a wonderfully comprehensive, exhaustive and accessible read that explains just why we drive the way we do and what it says about us.

There are several main arguments and elements of driving that Vanderbilt covers over the course of the book. The first is largely psychological, looking at the first major aspect of driving: The Driver. Without a driver, a car just sits in the driveway or a parking lot, and is for all intents and purposes, harmless. Putting a person behind the wheel subjects the car, driver and passengers to the judgment, attention and skill of the driver.

Attention seems to be the most important element for the driver, and this is something that Vanderbilt tackles right away in the book. Driver error is arguably one of the leading causes of crashes, and in this day and age, there's certainly no shortage of things to distract the driver, from other cars on the road, to mobile phones that are increasingly more complicated. Vanderbilt explains that driving is an extremely complicated process, and that in order to drive around safely without crashing into anything, the brain receives and processes a lot of information - eye tracking cameras have found that a driver is looking all over the place, to the side of the road, in front of the car and ahead, all while analyzing their surroundings and making decisions accordingly that minimize the risk to the occupants. In the instance of driving, eating, talking, fiddling with the radio and so forth, the brain has to essentially divert resources and stimuli in order to properly make those actions. Drivers who look down to text on their phone take their eyes off the road while moving, which creates an incredibly dangerous situation, as the car, moving at speed, is now captained by a driver who isn't acting on their surroundings.

Besides the driver looking at the road, the mentality of the drivers also comes into play. Vanderbilt describes the road as a place where a number of people who don't know each other must interact and cooperate, for the good of the system. Humans are social creatures - look to the difficulty of communicating online, where you are deprived of access of someone's voice and subsequent inflections, facial cues and so forth, and think back to the last time someone honked at you, passed aggressively, and so forth - the road is a place where numerous people come together, with a huge variety of training, habits and attitudes, and where there is virtually no feedback as to how you are doing on the road. Vanderbilt notes that just because a driver doesn't get into an accident, that doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't a poor driver - they've just been lucky. Most problems on the road stem from these relationships between drivers - miscommunications, the absence of communication and drivers not interpreting traffic correctly. As more drivers enter the road - and Vanderbilt notes that traffic is on the rise in the United States - it becomes more crucial for people to work better together while on the road.

Congestion and traffic is the next major issue that is covered in the book. It is noted several times that as highways were constructed in the 1950s and 1960s, they were put together with a certain intent for capacity. In the ensuing years since these roads were constructed, the ceilings for traffic volume has shot through the roof and roads are carrying far more than they were ever intended for. Vanderbilt looks at several issues associated with this: the various ways in which traffic is dealt with, but also how some solutions are really not solutions at all. With a higher volume of vehicles on the roads, Vanderbilt notes that traffic systems have to jockey all these cars around - traffic lights and signs have been longtime elements that have managed traffic, but have severe limitations. Similarly, their very presence impacts the behavior in of cars in ways that are sometimes counter to what is good for the overall system. Traffic lights stop cars completely, which stops the vehicles behind them. Once the green light clicks on, cars go though, but there is an inherent risk there, as cars travel through a projected path of the cars to the side of the intersection. I've long been a fan of rotaries - there is one here in Montpelier, with another one just opened after a couple months of construction, and I believe that they should be put into far more widespread use, as it not only keeps traffic moving smoothly (once people get used to using them), but it keeps drivers on their toes, rather than automatically expecting that they will be safe going through an intersection.

A major issue with congestion is traffic volume, and how driving impacts the rest of an overall system. Vanderbilt notes that often times, roads can handle a high number of cars, provided that there are no bottlenecks, such as accidents and slow-moving cars. He compares the system to a bucket of rice going through a funnel. A certain volume can be handled going through, but with more and more added, everything backs up. He cites one example of stop-lights that monitor the volume of an interstate, and will allow cars on accordingly, at lulls in the system, allowing traffic to move smoothly as a whole. At times, what is best for an individual driver can be harmful to the overall health of the system.

With that in mind, consider that the best thing for the system as a whole is the health and well being of the driver, and in order for that to be achieved most often, drivers need to drive safely, and to be alert. Vanderbilt suggests an argument that on the face seems very counter-intuitive, but one that makes a lot of sense: In order for drivers to be safer, they need to drive in unusually unsafe conditions. Think back to the time when you drove in unfamiliar territory, or a road that was somewhat dangerous, such as a mountain road. I've done that recently, and remembered that I was more alert, a little slower, and more conscious of my surroundings. Thus, I was paying far more attention to the road, and less on what was far less important, such as my mobile phone. This argument has been tried out in various countries, where municipalities have removed road signs from the road in order to make drivers more aware of their surroundings. The result was fewer accidents, not more, as drivers were forced to pay more attention to the cars and roadside than before, where they could not assume safety in the regulations.

Branching off from that argument, Vanderbilt notes that there is an increasingly seductive move to give drivers more space, more warning, and more comfort in order to take cars further apart from one another, or to give drivers more warnings about hazards. The result is that drivers feel more comfortable with their surroundings, but instead of making the road safer, it provides a sense of security that allows drivers to drive more hazardously. Top Gear, the popular BBC show, has ranted about an excess of road signs, placed in towns to mitigate liability for accidents, such as `Falling Rocks' (What am I meant to do with that information) and `Changed Priorities Ahead' (I'd been thinking that I'll be more responsible, pay off my mortgage and eat healthier, but when I saw that, I said screw it, I'll go to the pub). Similarly, cities with large numbers of bicycles and pedestrians have noted trends that follow this information: as drivers are more aware of less protected people, they tend to act accordingly. I recently read an article on a city that saw an increase in bike traffic, and rather than a rapid rise in collisions, there were fewer. The problem as I see it is that that drivers do not realize that driving is an inherently risky activity - seatbelts, airbags, crumple zones and the like give us the illusion that we are safer than we really are. To be fair, these instruments are still essential - it may make drivers feel safer, but in an accident, they will absolutely help to save people's lives.

The overall effect of this book is taking a familiar activity and looking at it in an incredible amount of detail. Prior to reading this book, I had no idea of much of the information, and after reading it, I've noticed a number of bad habits with my own driving - things that I'm mindful of now that I'm going to be working to correct. At the very least, I, and I'm sure far more people, are largely unaware of how our actions impact those around us. I've gone, in my mind, from a good driver to an average one, and I'm honestly surprised that I haven't been in an accident before. It's a revelation that needs to be imparted to the rest of the driving population, simply because of one chilling statistic: every time you drive, you have a 1 in a 100 chance of dying in a car accident over the course of your lifetime. This book, in a way, is about risk-management, and examining driving in a way that helps us become more aware of the risks that we take every time we get behind the wheel of the car. Similarly, it helps to put into perspective just how traffic works. It will certainly make me more responsible, knowing the overall context the roadway.

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Julie Neal

Driven to distraction

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 31, 2008

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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

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AK

Plenty of interesting facts on the subject of traffic but no synthesis

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 8, 2009

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First of all I did enjoy the book. It is very well written and nice to read - assuming you have even the slightest of interests in the topic.

And the science behind it is certainly interesting and without checking the literature quoted within, it seems to at least intuitively add up. Everything from our perceptional deficiencies, making us worse drivers, to road design and the schools of thinking behind it, and cultural differences that lead to traffic differences is covered in the book.

Where the book falls a bit short in my opinion is that it was written by a journalist type writer - which shows in its style. It does make it very readable but on the other hand, coming away from it, one cannot really say what the conclusions are.

The book would work a lot better if the elements were building blocks in a coherent framework, which would allow the readers really to raise their understanding of the topic. As it is, it's a bit of an interesting collection of traffic factoids, which one tends to forget soon after putting the book down - so its impact, apart from the entertainment value is lower than it could be.

One person found this helpful

Ian S

Driving from a different perspective.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 20, 2015

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A very unusual 'driving' book, it approaches the subject from a very different angle, but I found it very interesting and we'll written. It gives an insight in to the variety of research, thought processes and methods use by planners and authorities that directly affect drivers whilst negotiating their way along the world's roads. You'll still be stuck in traffic jams and slow moving traffic, but reading this book might make you think of the bigger picture when you are.

Jennifer Tipping

Traffic: You will never look at a traffic jam in the same way again.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 19, 2010

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In this book, Tom Vanderbilt looks at the subject of traffic from an eclectic range of perspectives. Covering driving psychology, social-anthropology, economics and traffic engineering, among others, he gives a comprehensive and original view of this uniquely human phenomenon. He shows the picture on the world's roads as it truly is, not how drivers, politicians or transport planners would want it to be.

In one chapter he covers the cognitive process of driving, based on the fact that humans did not evolve to travel at speeds of 60+ mph and so our sensory organs are not designed to work at such speeds. In another he covers calculations of risk, both ours and the insurance industry's. In another he shows how driving norms have evolved differently in different countries. And he achieves all this with an entertaining wit and a lot of useful pub facts.

Books about driving are often either testosterone-fuelled rants or so bogged down in finger-wagging minutiae they make The Highway Code look exciting. Despite being full of information, this book is an easy and enjoyable read and takes a warm and personal view of people on the move in all their wonderful irrational multiplicity.

I bought this book because I work in the industry. I would recommend it because it is really good!

2 people found this helpful

Keith Webber

Every road user should read this book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 5, 2019

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This book explains why most people should appear on lists of examples of terrible and dangerous driving. An eye-opener into how many nice people, as well as nasty ones, may try to kill you.

Mrs L H Jordan

Fascinating

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 23, 2014

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A fascinating read about the psychology of driving. As a trainee ADI this book has been invaluable in giving me some insight into how drivers think and behave. A really recommend this book for anyone who drives.

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