By Tom Vanderbilt
Might you be stunned that highway rage should be stable for society? Or that almost all crashes ensue on sunny, dry days? That our minds can trick us into considering the subsequent lane is relocating quicker? Or so that you can gauge a nation’s using habit via its degrees of corruption? those are just the various outstanding dynamics that Tom Vanderbilt explores during this attention-grabbing travel in the course of the mysteries of the line.
Based on exhaustive learn and interviews with using specialists and site visitors officers worldwide, Traffic will get lower than the hood of the standard task of using to discover the unusually complicated internet of actual, mental, and technical components that designate how site visitors works, why we force the best way we do, and what our riding says approximately us. Vanderbilt examines the perceptual limits and cognitive underpinnings that make us worse drivers than we expect we're. He demonstrates why plans to guard pedestrians from vehicles usually bring about extra injuries. He indicates how roundabouts, that could suppose risky and chaotic, truly make roads safer—and lessen site visitors within the discount. He uncovers who's likely to honk at whom, and why. He explains why site visitors jams shape, outlines the accidental outcomes of our quest for security, or even identifies the most typical mistake drivers make in parking lots.
The motor vehicle has lengthy been a vital a part of American existence; no matter if we see it as an emblem of freedom or a symptom of sprawl, we outline ourselves via what and the way we force. As Vanderbilt exhibits, riding is a provocatively revealing prism for analyzing how our minds paintings and the ways that we have interaction with each other. finally, Traffic is ready greater than riding: it’s approximately human nature. This e-book will swap the way in which we see ourselves and the realm round us. And who is familiar with? it might even make us larger drivers.
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Additional resources for Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)
Sample text
When someone does something good or something bad, Phelan suggests, we keep score in our heads—even though the chances are infinitely small that we will ever see that person again. But our big brains, which are said to have evolved to help manage relatively large social networks, might be getting a powerful signal from that encounter. So we get angrier than we really should over minor traffic slights, or feel much better than we should after moments of politeness. “I feel like that happens a lot on the road,” says Phelan.
One study of pedestrian fatalities by French researchers showed that a significant number were associated with a “change of mode”—for example, moving from car to foot—as if, the authors speculated, drivers leaving their vehicles still felt a certain invulnerability. ” This is why car insurance premiums are tied not only to driving history but, more controversially, to credit scores; risky credit, the thinking goes, correlates with taking risks on the road. The statistical association between lower credit scores and higher insurance losses is just that, however; the reasons why how one lives might be linked to how one drives are less clear.
Then there’s the “nose-pick factor,” a term used by researchers who install cameras inside of cars to study drivers. They report that after only a short time, drivers will “forget the camera” and begin to do all sorts of things, including nasal probing. The flip side of anonymity, as the classic situationist psychological studies of Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram have shown, is that it encourages aggression. In a well-known 1969 study, Zimbardo found that hooded subjects were willing to administer twice the level of electric shock to others than those not wearing hoods.