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

Vanderbilt, Tom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307397726 ISBN 13: 9780307397720

Publisher: Knopf Canada, 2008

Synopsis

Driving is a fact of life. We are all spending more and more time on the road, and traffic is an issue we face everyday. This book will make you think about it in a whole new light.

We have always had a passion for cars and driving. Now Traffic offers us an exceptionally rich understanding of that passion. Vanderbilt explains why traffic jams form, outlines the unintended consequences of our attempts to engineer safety and even identifies the most common mistakes drivers make in parking lots. Based on exhaustive research and interviews with driving experts and traffic officials around the globe, Traffic gets under the hood of the quotidian activity of driving to uncover the surprisingly complex web of physical, psychological and technical factors that explain how traffic works.

About this title

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.

Reviews

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.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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 polit...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf Canada
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0307397726
• ISBN 13: 9780307397720
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416