Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 629.283
EAN: 9780307264787
ISBN: 0307264785
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 416
Publication Date: 2008-07-29
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: 2008-07-29
Studio: Knopf

Would you be surprised that road rage can be good for society? Or that most crashes happen on sunny, dry days? That our minds can trick us into thinking the next lane is moving faster? Or that you can gauge a nation’s driving behavior by its levels of corruption? These are only a few of the remarkable dynamics that Tom Vanderbilt explores in this fascinating tour through the mysteries of the road.

Based on exhaustive research and interviews with driving experts and traffic officials around the globe, Traffic gets under the hood of the everyday activity of driving to uncover the surprisingly complex web of physical, psychological, and technical factors that explain how traffic works, why we drive the way we do, and what our driving says about us. Vanderbilt examines the perceptual limits and cognitive underpinnings that make us worse drivers than we think we are. He demonstrates why plans to protect pedestrians from cars often lead to more accidents. He shows how roundabouts, which can feel dangerous and chaotic, actually make roads safer—and reduce traffic in the bargain. He uncovers who is more likely to honk at whom, and why. He explains why traffic jams form, outlines the unintended consequences of our quest for safety, and even identifies the most common mistake drivers make in parking lots.

The car has long been a central part of American life; whether we see it as a symbol of freedom or a symptom of sprawl, we define ourselves by what and how we drive. As Vanderbilt shows, driving is a provocatively revealing prism for examining how our minds work and the ways in which we interact with one another. Ultimately, Traffic is about more than driving: it’s about human nature. This book will change the way we see ourselves and the world around us. And who knows? It may even make us better drivers.

Customer Rating:
Summary: A great topic but a little dry
Comment: Vanderbilt does a great job of bringing to light a lot of interesting quirks in how we drive. Unfortunately his still of prose is a little too much like a manual so sometimes what should be fascinating becomes mildly interesting.

Overall a very good read but if you read it at night it might take longer.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: You are not as good a driver as you think you ae
Comment: A fascinating and eye-opening look at the reasons behind the ways we drive. You may not be as good a driver as you think you are, and this book will tell you why. Written in an entertaining style, but with full documentation and endnotes for those who need more

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Probably nothing you don't already know; at times very dry; anti-American bias
Comment: Calling Americans as a group "gun-crazy" is sort of like calling us "free-speech crazy," except that author Tom Vanderbilt never acuses our interest in preserving our First Amendment as being responsible for deaths (12--fewer than, he notes, are killed annually in America by lightning) on the road.

But perhaps Volvo drivers (TWICE pointed out that the author is) just have an unnatural fear of guns.

The point of his book: Everyone tends to overestimate our driving and love-making skills. We all want more people (but not us) to use public transportation. Building more roads just encourages more people to use them. And few people really have basic driving skills, having received instruction as teenagers in how to get a driver's license--not necessarily in how to be a good driver.

The book is generally dry and spends an inordinate amount of time talking about the diets of crickets and the commute patterns on ants. Its saving grace--also a flaw of generalization--is that instead of quoting numbers exclusively, somewhat-vague phrases such as "Even people who do not own a car are more likely to commute via car than public transit."

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Facinating tour? Hardly...
Comment: I thought this book might be enlightening about why we drive the way we do. This was the dullest 6 hours of book on CD I have ever listened to. Putting the words "fascinating" and "provocatively" on the jacket is really a stretch.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Comment: I wanted so much to like this book. I was thinking it was another one of those pop psych books (like Nudge, Blink - you know the formula) that takes a body of research in social science and draws some interesting, unexpected conclusions in a well-written, very engaging, New Yorker kind of style. Unfortunately, it's really just a pastiche. It reminded me of a magazine article that was maybe about 300 pages too long.

The book's basic structure is to introduce some research study, tie it to a person and some Robert-Ludlum-like phrase ("the x hypothesis," "the y effect," "the z conundrum"), discuss it in a half-digested way, speculate all over the place on what it might mean, then make a tortured connection to the next study.

There is simply too much information and not enough focus. The author needed to limit his data and tie it more closely together. (An editor would have helped.)

As I read, I kept saying to myself, "So what?" over and over again. And after reading halfway through the book, I had to ask myself what I had really learned here. Unfortunately, the answer was "very little" and I had to give it up.

If it weren't for the interesting nuggets here and there, I would have given it 1 star. On the whole, though, I was very disappointed. I really did expect something more than an Uncle John's Bathroom Reader on such an interesting, largely unaddressed aspect of human behavior.

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