William Cline's Reviews > Traffic

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Traffic
by

Tom Vanderbilt

William Cline's review

Feb 19, 2011

really liked it

bookshelves: motoring, long-books-on-dry-topics

Well researched and engaging. Distracted driving is a hobbyhorse of mine, along with motoring in general, so I’m pre-disposed to enjoy a book like this. Still, I think everyone who drives a car would take something away from this and ought to read it.

Driving enthusiasts, among whom I count myself, will find some challenging ideas in here. For instance, regarding the oft-repeated notion that speed variance, not speed itself, is a greater source of highway crashes, Vanderbilt supplies the missing context showing that this doesn’t mean exactly what we think it means.

On the other hand, Traffic isn't full of the knee-jerk anti-car disparagement often found in writings about street safety. (I'm looking at you, Streetsblog.) Nor does Vanderbilt claim that the answer is to rely on technology to absolve us from responsibility for our own behavior:

“Whether advanced driver training helps drivers in the long term is one of those controversial and unresolved mysteries of the road, but my eye-opening experience at Bondurant raises the curious idea that we buy cars—for most people one of the most costly things they will ever own—with an underdeveloped sense of how to use them. This is true for many things, arguably, but not knowing what the F9 key does in Microsoft Word is less life-threatening than not knowing how to properly operate antilock brakes.”

6 likes · Like ∙ flag

Sign into Goodreads to see if any of your friends have read Traffic.

Quotes William Liked

“The relative ease of most driving lures us into thinking we can get away with doing other things. Indeed, those other things, like listening to the radio, can help when driving itself is threatening to cause fatigue. But we buy into the myth of multitasking with little actual knowledge of how much we can really add in or, as with the television news, how much we are missing. 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.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic

1 likes

“This is the reason the whole ‘keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel, use the hands-free handset’ idea is a silly thing,” Simons said. “Having your eyes on the road doesn’t do any good unless your attention is on the road too.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic

1 likes

“This raises the interesting, if seemingly outlandish, question of why car drivers, virtually alone among users of wheeled transport, do not wear helmets. Yes, cars do provide a nice metal cocoon with inflatable cushions. But in Australia, for example, head injuries among car occupants, according to research by the Federal Office of Road Safety, make up half the country’s traffic-injury costs. Helmets, cheaper and more reliable than side-impact air bags, would reduce injuries and cut fatalities by some 25 percent.95 A crazy idea, perhaps, but so were air bags once.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic

2 likes

“Whether advanced driver training helps drivers in the long term is one of those controversial and unresolved mysteries of the road, but my eye-opening experience at Bondurant raises the curious idea that we buy cars—for most people one of the most costly things they will ever own—with an underdeveloped sense of how to use them. This is true for many things, arguably, but not knowing what the F9 key does in Microsoft Word is less life-threatening than not knowing how to properly operate antilock brakes.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic

0 likes