I tried to like Traffic but it was just too poorly written. For example, some of the descriptions of road situations were very difficult to understand. Hasn't the author heard of diagrams? Would've been a much easier read with diagrams. The author also failed to address some basic issues and instead suggested some very questionable ideas with only anecdotal support. ( )

Pretty good up to a point but then I wanted more "hard stuff": more data on why we do the things we do. And it didn't answer my question of "why do 3-lane highways suck do bad." ( )

This was a fun read. Traffic is interesting because it's something most of us experience frequently, and it's possibly the most visible complex system most of us deal with. In this book, Vanderbilt explores the challenges of traffic. Traffic suffers from the dual challenges of individual psychology and dueling external constraints.

On the psychology side, people are prone to making traffic decisions that seem personally optimal, but these often lead to sub par performance. For example, in heavy traffic, drivers will often speed up when they see gaps in front of them and then slow down when they approach the end of those gaps. The acceleration and deceleration cause ripple affects behind them, leading to more variation in traffic flow. Everyone would be better off if they stayed at a steady pace -- even if "that jerk" then takes the space you didn't -- but that doesn't feel like the best choice.

An example of external constraints are that traffic varies throughout the day. A road system that was built to smoothly handle peak traffic would be ridiculously over provisioned for the bulk of the time when traffic isn't at peak.

Most interesting are the examples of how individual psychology interacts with the external constraints. A 5 lane road with wide shoulders and sidewalks with no obstructions may seem safer -- cars are less likely to hit obstructions and pedestrians are further from cars -- but when compared with similarly placed smaller roads, there are often less car/pedestrian accidents. On the first road, pedestrians are an aberration. Cars are driving, essentially, as if they are on a highway, so if a pedestrian is present, they are less likely to be noticed. The smaller road, on the other hand, doesn't feel like a place one should drive fast. The greater need for attention and the slower speeds decrease both the number of car/pedestrian accidents and their severity.

The book is full of interesting thought experiments like these. If anything, the main weakness of the book is that it is essentially a collection of tales of the traffic system and leaves me wanting to read some actual books on traffic engineering and psychology. :-) ( )

I rarely read non-fiction books all the way through... I suppose I am overly reliant on a narrative of some kind. But, I really like the way this book was written and how consisely Vanderbilt distilled many studies into an understanding of the psychology of driving habits. I frequently find myself talking about the conclusions discussed in the book, much to the dismay of my husband. ( )

Adult nonfiction. Tom Vanderbilt does his best to scare us into being more careful drivers (and well we should). Some 40,000 in the US are killed in car crashes each year--that's more people killed each month than were killed in the September 11 attacks--yet no one seems to take this "threat" seriously. He talks about the false sense of security that people get from driving so much without incident, when the only reason they haven't gotten into any accidents is mainly pure luck. There is an interesting comparison between American driver habits and those drivers in other countries (not always necessarily better or worse, just different). ( )