TRAFFIC

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us, by Tom Vanderbilt: As someone who’s always had a long driving commute (although ironically, I read most of this book while riding the Metro to work) and now lives in one of the world’s most infamous traffic cities, I found this collection of factoids about the psychology of driving fascinating. While not much hard information stuck with me (except, randomly, for the fact that about 75 traffic signals in L.A. run on “Sabbath timing,” where it’s not necessary to press the button to get a pedestrian walk sign from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown, because Sabbath-observant Jews are not supposed to operate machinery on the Sabbath—and the city offered to install sensors that activated the walk signal automatically when a pedestrian was present, but was rebuffed because even passively triggering a device would be considered breaking the Sabbath), I do think the book made me a more thoughtful and careful driver. After being barraged with statistics and studies about how the human brain isn’t evolutionarily equipped to operate at the high speeds we drive, and how everyone thinks they’re a much better driver than they really are, and hundreds more odd quirks of biology and sociology that underscore how illogical people’s behavior behind the wheel can be, driving doesn’t seem the simple, casual undertaking it did before. (Not that I’m paranoid now—in fact, it seems miraculous that traffic functions as well as it does!) A worthy read for anyone who drives (or bikes or walks).