Book #73: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do by Tom Vanderbilt

This book was really, really fascinating. As you might expect from the title, it's an investigation into all things related to driving--how we drive, what we think about when we drive, how we react to traffic signs, how traffic norms differ from culture to culture, etc. This is something Tommy and I are always talking about (aren't we all, since we all drive all the time?) and it was really cool to learn more about why traffic lights are so obnoxious and how traffic jams happen. Vanderbilt researched tons of scholarly articles and compiled them here, in addition to interviewing traffic engineers in cities across the world. Several very interesting things that I remember off the top of my head:

-There are actually people who work as traffic engineers! Yes, I actually knew that, but it's amazing to imagine people actually plan and design the roads and intersections to be the way they are, and there are reasons for every little decision that is made about their design (or at least there should be): how much to curve the road, how long the light should last until it changes to yellow, how many lanes to add to the road.
-The intersection of the 405 and the 10 in Santa Monica is the most congested part of freeway in the country--and we lived about two miles from it this summer! No wonder it always took us 25 minutes or more to drive the 4.6 miles to the temple.
-People assume they're better drivers than they are. They also assume that the safer/newer/nicer their car is, the worse they can drive and get away with it without any serious problems, which basically just cancels out the advantages that new safety additions bring to your new, nice, safe car.
-The best way to make things safer may just be to make the roads more dangerous. People drive more cautiously and therefore get into fewer accidents on thin, windy roads than they do on wide, smooth highways.
-People think that the better way to get rid of traffic is to add more roads, or more lanes to the roads that exist, but even when you do that, they get filled up. It's a real-life equivalent to "If you build it, they will come"--there have to be other, better ways to fight congestion.

These are all just general facts that I remember from the book, but it's filled with really fascinating statistics and case studies that make these ideas much more meaningful. I'm going to get Tommy to read it because it's so interesting, and I think something that he'd really enjoy--he's always joking that his goal after he graduates is to fix the horrible algorithms that are used to organize traffic lights. He'll just have to fight the traffic engineers to do it first.