Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)

Just the title of this book fascinated me. I tend to be interested in book topics that seems so mundane and everyday that one wonders how it is possible to fill an entire book. I quickly learned, however, that filling a 400 page book with information about traffic is rather easy. Perhaps because it is something that almost all Americans do, driving a vehicle only seems easy. In actuality, the act of driving is anything but natural and the occurrence of traffic has gotten exponentially larger as more automobiles have entered our lives (though traffic itself is an ancient phenomenon).

Vanderbilt covers the bases in nine chapters (including the anonymity/lack of social interaction when driving, human misperceptions, measures to curtail traffic, parking, commuting, signs and road engineering, culture, and risk) citing study after study about traffic and driving. His writing style and congenial approach to the topic provide character to the facts without sacrificing the depth of the research. Also included are numerous conversational anecdotes that Vanderbilt amassed through interviews with the world's leading traffic and driving researchers. Traffic and driving are indeed complicated; there are no easy fixes that will work everywhere and with everyone. Counter-intuitively, more roads create more traffic, and the more we try to control and "fix" traffic, the more problems and traffic we create. I was enlightened by this book, and I daresay my driving has improved.

Pretty good. Has a couple of instances of what I thought was superficial analysis, and a couple of bits of dodgy logic, but those are probably arguable, and maybe it's just me.

It's fairly well written, although not the most exciting thing in the world. A minor annoyance is that even though there are fairly extensive bibliographic notes at the back, there's no indication of that in the main text, so for a while I was quite outraged as the author talked about various studies, without enough information to find the actual study, should someone want to check on what he was saying... I still prefer footnotes on each page, so you can at least see where something was published at a glance, but at least he had the information there.

It's a good read. It's mainly a fairly shallow, broad analysis from a traffic engineering point of view, with a few anecdotes thrown in. Still got a fairly solid base for what's really a pop-sci book. I think it needed to pay more attention to sociology/anthropology, but I guess that's not really what it was aiming for...

Much of what we believe about traffic is wrong. The author effectively drives that point home at many times throughout this book. He converted me on two issues: roundabouts and cell phone usage while driving. I still hate driving through roundabouts, but I regret my neighborhood's pressure to put in a stop light instead of a roundabout ate an intersection by a school in our neighborhood. Looking back, I was wrong in my belief the traffic light would provide more safety for the hordes of children walking to school through the intersection every day.

I've also given up cell phones while I drive. I did believe I was compensating while talking, but I was, in fact, doing exactly what the author said cell phone users do: drive like a teenager by fixating on the road in front of me. I wonder though, how they differ from having a conversation with a passenger.

I do think he got one issue backwards. He briefly mentioned red light cameras as improving safety, but I've read they typically increase the accident rates at intersections because they increase rear end collisions caused by people slamming on their brakes to avoid a ticket.

An oddly fascinating book for a person like myself who dislikes the activity of driving, invests little of my personal psychology into my car, and currently lives in a traffic-free part of america. Why fascinating? because whether I like it or not, I drive almost everyday, and I drove for almost 10 years in a dense traffic heavy urban environment.

It turns out that traffic is an interesting problem. Congestion is apparently economically viable, in the sense that people and businesses are obviously willing to undergo congestion and thus probably generate a profit somehow doing so. This book offers lots of counter-intuitive insights into driving, traffic and congestion.

Hard to say who I would recommend this to - I suspect that most people don't care to know more about driving! Certainly one of my takeaways was a re-affirmation of complicated and unsafe driving is - something which you keep hearing (if you're the risk business) but here there are quite a few examples that bring it home.

The history of traffic is surprisingly interesting (can you tell the age of a highway to highway merge by its design?) but the different design schools that exist today and the cross-cultural, cross-country comparisons are even more interesting.

Fascinating and entertaining! This is the only book I know of that takes a comprehensive (if not incredibly deep) look at driving and traffic from a variety of perspectives, including physiological and psychological limitations of the driver, to traffic as a system and engineering problem, to traffic and driving habits as a cultural phenomenon. Although the author is a journalist, not a scientist or engineer, and the book is designed for easy consumption by a mass audience, the book is thoroughly researched, and virtually everything in it is supported by scientific studies and journal articles, as well as interviews with experts in the field. While much of the information presented is intuitive in at least the general sense, the author presents enough ideas that are surprising or counter-intuitive to make it worth your while. Particularly fascinating to me were the paradoxical aspects of driving risk - making cars or roads safer may result in riskier driver behavior, nullifying the gains in safety, while making roads SEEM more dangerous (such as adding a traffic circle or curviness) may make them safer, by increasing driver alertness.

This shold be required reading for every driver and driver's ED class. Although a lot of it was more geared to heavy city traffic just getting you to think about the enormity of piloting car was worth the time. His tales of traffic around the world was very interesting too. I live in a pretty much non-traffic area (having to wait through one cycle of a light is thought to be a burden, except on football game days, but why anyone would subject themselves to that I don't understand) so it did make me appreciate being able to just zip to work. His focus on the trials of traffic jam traffic was understandable but not particularly helpful to me. Still anyone that drives should consider reading this. I guarentee it will make you think more, and just maybe convince you to concentrate on the road and leave the phone conversations for when you aren't a hazard and a death trap.

Fascinating book about our driving habits, the science of traffic flow, the psychology of our relationships to our cars and other drivers. Like the internet, driving allows us a degree of anomynity which can result in some behaviour we would never allow ourselves in public as individuals. When was the last time you flipped the bird to someone in the grocery store? What about when driving? That's just one of the interesting aspects of driving that Vanderbilt explores. (That's why people who drive convertibles with the tops down usually allow drivers in front of them more time to proceed after the light turns green.) Here's another: when lanes converge on a highway, don't you get pissed off at the drivers who continue to the bitter end and merge at the last minute? Are you a driver that tries to stop them by blocking the merging lane? Well, if you are, you're impeding the traffic flow, because those last-minute mergers are doing what traffic coordinators want them to do. How do traffic managers know how far before the merge to notify drivers of the change? What is the science? What about sharing the road with pedestrians and bicyclists? Drivers are more likely to slow down if they DON'T catch the eye of the person trying to cross the street. They're more likely to give room to the cyclist who isn't wearing a helmet.

These are just a few of the interesting tidbits offered by this thoughtful book. Driving is a very complex task that we all tend to take for granted (which is why people tend to multi-task during the process). What Vanderbilt imparts may help us improve or at least appreciate the complexity of what we're doing every day.

I found this book very boring. I've driven all over the world and this book could have been finished in half as long.

It's surprising that with all the driving everyone does, and the opinions everyone has about it, that very few people know much about it. This book fills the gap, in an entertaining manner. I learned so many fun facts, it's hard to remember all of them. But the one that comes up again and again is that people in general overestimate their driving ability. Another favorite is that, counter to intuition, rotaries are safer and more efficient than intersections with traffic lights. (I wish I'd known that when I lived in Boston.) And of course, the distraction of cell phones: people are generally against other people driving while talking on a cell phone, but think they themselves can handle it. To put it bluntly, they're wrong.

A long but interesting read - it particularly gets good in the later chapters. To sum up, most of popular knowledge and decision making about cars is plain wrong. That SUV is more dangerous than a regular car and ABS brakes have made virtually no difference. Country driving is a far greater danger than city driving. Driving tired is as bad as driving drunk. The chapter on local driving customs was particularly good and says a lot about ethnic driving habits in Toronto.

Much of the information in this book will be tribal knowledge to an urban driver. The endnotes delve into some the contraversies deeper and are probably worth reading as you go along.