Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do
On December - 14 - 2009
5 Comments
- ISBN13: 9780307277190
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Product Description
A New York Times Notable Book
One of the Best Books of the Year
The Washington Post • The Cleveland Plain-Dealer • Rocky Mountain News
In this brilliant, lively, and eye-opening investigation, Tom Vanderbilt examines the perceptual limits and cognitive underpinnings that make us worse drivers than we think we are. He demonstrates why plans to protect pedestrians from cars often lead to more accidents. He uncovers who is mo… More >>
My husband has a long driving commute, and since he has talked about the best merging techniques and other traffic trivia, I thought he would like this audio book. He said there is a lot of boring narritive and few nuggets of info. He didn’t even finish listening to the CD set. I wouldn’t recommend it.
Rating: 1 / 5
I so so so so so wanted to like this book, but at the end of the day it is boring.
Rating: 1 / 5
I have not read this book, so this review is about the actual pages of the book, which are those terribly cut pages that look like some kid in kindergarden using dull kiddy scissors cut the pages. I hate those pages, and had I known this book had them I would not have ordered this book!
Rating: 3 / 5
Terrific premise. I wanted so badly to love this book. Now I’m just thankful I got it from the library – don’t waste your money! Almost all of his observations are developed from anecdotes. And anyone who’s spent time on the road has similar anecdotes and can develop similar observations. Trouble is, there’s almost no rigorous science. Very little consistency, or even logic, either. The author has some stuff to say that he thinks is interesting, and says it. He doesn’t actually provide any enlightenment.
Rating: 1 / 5
I am writing this review as EXACTLY the type of review I wish I had available to read BEFORE I purchased this book. There are a number of intellectually brilliant observations, regarding not only driving, but the psychological internal calculations and formulas, that the human brain automatically solves… that the body surrounding the brain has no idea is being done… but is governed by the result. There are also periodic humorous examples to summarize a lesson you’ve just been taught by the author. BUT… the road between the amazing revelations… and between the humorous anecdotes… are more often than not… like reading the most laborious, lengthy, manuals, printed by the DEPARTMENT OF MOTOR VEHICLES. (DMV)
That being said; each time I was almost ready to give up on reading the tedious descriptions by psychiatrists, psychologists, professors, and government officials… an absolute gem of information would be presented to the reader, akin to a carrot hung in front of a horse… that would make me “soldier-on” through the next DMV dissertation. Before I list some personal favorites, I just want to advise potential readers that this is definitely not a light, whimsical, beach read… where people will say… “I couldn’t put it down; I stayed up all night reading it”… unless you’re a professor or on a government task force. As I always told my son when he was a youngster: “NOTHING IN LIFE IS FREE!” To get to the next bit of treasure… the reader will have to do some heavy lifting on a number of pages.
“So much time is spent in cars in the United States; studies show that drivers (particularly men) have higher rates of skin cancer on their left sides – look for the opposite effect in countries where people drive on the left.”
“In America a pedestrian is someone who has just parked their car.”
“Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.” – Albert Einstein -
“The problem with visual illusions-and it has been argued that all human vision is an illusion – is that we fall for them, even when we know they are illusions.”
The last two paragraphs I am listing below, is the sole reason I am giving this book four stars instead of three. When I read these paragraphs I literally dropped what I was doing and called my son… because this phenomena had bugged the both of us for at least fifteen years. For me this knowledge paid for the book!
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“You may have noticed how in movies or on television, the spokes on a car’s wheels sometimes seem to be moving “backward”. This so-called wagon-wheel effect happens in movies because they are composed of a flickering set of images (generally twenty-four frames per second), even though we perceive them to be smooth and uninterrupted. Like the dancers in a disco captured briefly by a strobe light, each frame of that movie captures an image of the spokes. If the frequency of the wheel’s rotation perfectly matched the flicker rate of the film, the wheel would appear “not” to be moving. As the wheel moves faster, though, each spoke is “captured” at a different place with each frame (e.g. we may see a spoke at the twelve o’ clock position on one sweep, but at eleven-forty-five on the next) so it seemingly begins to move backward.”
“As the cognitive psychologists Dale Purves and Tim Andrews note, however, the wagon-wheel effect can happen in real life as well, under full sunlight, when the “stroboscopic” effect of movies does not apply. The reason we still see the effect, they suggest, is that, as with movies, we perceive the world, not as a continuous flow, but in a series of discrete and sequential “frames”. At a certain point the rotation of the wheel begins to EXCEED THE BRAIN’S ABILITY TO PROCESS IT, AND WE STRUGGLE TO CATCH UP, we begin to confuse the current stimulus (i.e., the spoke) in real time with the stimulus in a previous frame. The car wheel is not spinning backward, any more than disco dancers are moving in slow motion. But this effect should provide an early, and cautionary, clue to some of the visual curiosities of the road.”
Rating: 4 / 5