Robyn's Reviews > Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

Please take this 4 star rating with a grain of salt! Glad to have found this book for 2 bucks at the Saskatoon Symphony book sale or it would likely have never crossed my radar.

I hate driving. I hate cars. I own a car and I drive it, but I consider it not much more than a necessary evil in order to conduct my life in the place I choose to live (but oh, how I fantasize about living in a city where cars aren't the primary form of transportation). I walk/bike/bus when I can to avoid driving, because I find it mentally draining and am aware of how unsafe cars and driving are. This realization that I hated driving was one thing that led me into an interest in active transportation and more generally, urban design for livability, and the info in Traffic fit in nicely with what I've been learning so far.

This book is over a decade old so I was a bit worried that it might be out of date. I read the chapter about how hard it is to design self-driving cars because of the human factors involved, wondered if technology had solved the problems since, and literally the next day saw a headline about a self-driving car killing a pedestrian for exactly the reasons described in the book. This happened again after reading the chapter on whether realtime congestion data will be able to solve congestion; the next day (again! It was getting spooky at this point) I saw an article on CityLab about how realtime congestion data is actually making things worse.

So, this book has not aged poorly by any stretch; if anything it shows us that it is very, very difficult to separate out the human side of traffic. As a human factors nerd and armchair urbanist I find this all VERY VERY INTERESTING! Also, confirmed that I am right to feel the way about driving that I do - driving is absolutely dangerous, and absolutely a major mental strain. (If you think it's not, maybe you need to read at least a couple chapters of this book.) So I am giving this book 4 stars because this topic is my jam and I learned a lot.

That said, unless this topic is also your jam, you probably will feel differently. I did not find the writing especially entertaining, and absolutely loathed the citation style, which was essentially a repetition of the phrase "studies have shown" over and over and having to flip to the back of the book to find the reference. What is it with pop sci books not using footnotes? I find this citation style endlessly frustrating. Some chapters were more interesting than others in terms of the writing, I thought. Overall most chapters were about 25 pages which is a doable length for an evening (I couldn't imagine reading more than a chapter a day since the information was so dense), but a couple were slightly longer. I wasn't "excited" to pick up this book and read it; it borderline felt like a chore but at the same time I knew it was information I wanted to know. Does that even make sense?

I'm very glad to have read this book. It was very well-researched, but not quite as well-written, and thus I can't recommend it to just anyone. If you are very interested in the topics it covers you will probably enjoy it, but if you only feel a passing interest, I would maybe just recommend reading some longer-form reviews of this book to get the general summary.