Kind of like traffic, mostly boring.

I only gave this three stars, but please don't misunderstand. There's nothing wrong with the book, it's just that, personally, I couldn't help but wonder every so often why I was reading this book about something that is, for better or for worse, pretty banal. However, I really am glad I read it, because I do believe that reading it will make anyone into a safer driver, bicyclist, and pedestrian. I'm usually a bicyclist myself, and I think this book helped me get a better feeling for how drivers who don't also bicycle regard me -- if they regard me at all!

I'd say the main points I got out of this book are that speed kills, so slow the heck down, that safety measures cause people to drive faster and with less safety, so you have to be particularly vigilant while walking in crosswalks, for instance, and that I am just so utterly thankful to live in a city where I can ride my bicycle to and from work!! I'd forgotten just how detrimental it can be to one's life to commute in traffic in a car! Also, I'm happy to be I'm the US instead of in, say, Delhi! Delhi sounds like hell on wheels --get it? ON WHEELS!

I selected this book based on a suggestion on the Bikepgh.org web site. I expected it to be focused on cycling but I was surprised to find that it was not. Quite an interesting read, the author explores everything from highway design (or lack thereof) to human physiological responses to driving to psychology. In order to really glean anything useful from this book the reader does have to be willing to take an objective look at their habits.

I read this on my Kindle.

This was a great book. It could have been a bit shorter and would work just as well (if not better), but it fits in nicely with the Freakanomics/Outliers/Kluge/How We Decide genre that seems to get bigger and bigger each year (ok, that was a dumb statement but you know what I mean). What makes this book stand out is that it's a topic that just about everyone has experience with and it's well documented. Like all the books in this area, it's got a nice mix of expected and counter-intuitive arguments and the author employs both effectively to make a well-paced book that is surprisingly interesting given the subject matter.

OK, I am a traffic and engineering geek, so I was pre-disposed to like this. But I think Vanderbilt does a good job of explaining the science to laymen, and getting into all the psychological stuff which you wouldn't normally think about associated with traffic.

And, I've been driving way more carefully in my local streets -- it's a complete eye-opener in that sense.

Vanderbilt does a superb job of presenting what might otherwise seem like a very dry and mundane topic, in an engaging, compelling, and exhaustively researched volume.

My thoughts while reading:
1. We need to drive less
2. Humans are not that great at driving.
3. Bring on the self-driving cars!
4. I do NOT want my kids to drive.
5. Cities should be designed for people, not cars.
6. We need to drive less.

There is so much good data in this overview of the psychology of driving. Driving is the most dangerous thing most of us will do but it is also one of the most automatic. We should probably think about it a little more and if we did we'd say "We should design our lives and our places so we can drive less."
thedoctorsaysrun's profile picture

thedoctorsaysrun's review

4.0

Although now a decade old, it is still an engaging and enlightening read (listen). I'd love to see this updated with current statistics. And it make a powerful argument near the end about the time, energy and angst we spend on the "war on terror" [and I would now extrapolate to undocumented immigrants] when in reality we lose more lives on a regular basis from traffic "terrorists" [my word].

Quite an amazing book. The pages are full of studies, research and statistics that I found absolutely memorizing. It is a treat to learn how we, as individuals and a group, affect traffic and the effect traffic has on us. A joy to read.

The content is moderately interesting, but the author doesn't present it well. Little of his analysis gets any deeper than "humans are weird, engineers don't know everything." To be fair, I didn't follow along with the notes, which may go into better detail. In the main text, he describes results strangely, often using absolute numbers in places where rates would be more appropriate. At one point, he describes a study that links low but non-zero BAC levels to safer driving, then follows up by explaining that the study in question didn't control for age. This meant the zero-BAC numbers were skewed because the non-drinkers were disproportionately the underage and the elderly, both groups with below-average safety records. This obliterates the original "fact" - it's no longer an interesting counterintuitive tidbit about traffic, it's a vaguely interesting lesson in poor study design and doesn't belong in the book. This kind of padding leaves the book feeling bloated.