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

Holy cow, this book was awesome. Pop science in which the author puts together a lot of studies about how driving actually works (like the physics and technology of how cars move) and ways this gets translated by people driving cars. It was the kind of book where every single paragraph contained at least one amazing fact. Like so amazing that everyone I know is really lucky that I wasn't calling you at 2 AM on a Wednesday to tell you that up to 20% of the earth's surface can be covered in insect swarms in a given moment. TWENTY PERCENT, PEOPLE. If you're wondering how that relates to traffic, apparently it came up in a conversation he was having with someone who was comparing information about insect swarming behaviors to traffic congestion models. I should point out that most of the amazing facts were more directly about driving, but the fact that the author was compelled to wedge this one in there makes me feel like he's a kindred spirit.

This is also the kind of book that makes me wish I had a better guidance counselor in high school, in terms of career planning. Or I don't know, maybe the guidance counselor wouldn't even have had a chance, given that a basic description of how engineers can use systems analysis to make recommendations about public policy sounds like a terrible job. It sounds like the most boring thing ever, until you get to the actual examples of engineers and other scientists playing around with traffic flow and then it sounds like the best job ever.

Of course this was a winner with me right out of the gate, because the very first section is an explanation of why the zipper merge is more efficient for everyone than the early merge. THE ZIPPER. Be still my heart.