Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)

A fascinating and eye-opening look at the reasons behind the ways we drive. You may not be as good a driver as you think you are, and this book will tell you why. Written in an entertaining style, but with full documentation and endnotes for those who need more

Calling Americans as a group "gun-crazy" is sort of like calling us "free-speech crazy," except that author Tom Vanderbilt never acuses our interest in preserving our First Amendment as being responsible for deaths (12--fewer than, he notes, are killed annually in America by lightning) on the road.

But perhaps Volvo drivers (TWICE pointed out that the author is) just have an unnatural fear of guns.

The point of his book: Everyone tends to overestimate our driving and love-making skills. We all want more people (but not us) to use public transportation. Building more roads just encourages more people to use them. And few people really have basic driving skills, having received instruction as teenagers in how to get a driver's license--not necessarily in how to be a good driver.

The book is generally dry and spends an inordinate amount of time talking about the diets of crickets and the commute patterns on ants. Its saving grace--also a flaw of generalization--is that instead of quoting numbers exclusively, somewhat-vague phrases such as "Even people who do not own a car are more likely to commute via car than public transit."

I thought this book might be enlightening about why we drive the way we do. This was the dullest 6 hours of book on CD I have ever listened to. Putting the words "fascinating" and "provocatively" on the jacket is really a stretch.

I wanted so much to like this book. I was thinking it was another one of those pop psych books (like Nudge, Blink - you know the formula) that takes a body of research in social science and draws some interesting, unexpected conclusions in a well-written, very engaging, New Yorker kind of style. Unfortunately, it's really just a pastiche. It reminded me of a magazine article that was maybe about 300 pages too long.

The book's basic structure is to introduce some research study, tie it to a person and some Robert-Ludlum-like phrase ("the x hypothesis," "the y effect," "the z conundrum"), discuss it in a half-digested way, speculate all over the place on what it might mean, then make a tortured connection to the next study.

There is simply too much information and not enough focus. The author needed to limit his data and tie it more closely together. (An editor would have helped.)

As I read, I kept saying to myself, "So what?" over and over again. And after reading halfway through the book, I had to ask myself what I had really learned here. Unfortunately, the answer was "very little" and I had to give it up.

If it weren't for the interesting nuggets here and there, I would have given it 1 star. On the whole, though, I was very disappointed. I really did expect something more than an Uncle John's Bathroom Reader on such an interesting, largely unaddressed aspect of human behavior.

So much information in this book (and let me say, really interesting facts on traffic, roads, drivers etc) but you get brain-strain trying to remember it al1.

Feel like I need to get an edited copy, with some of the most important and relevant facts all compiled easily (a bit like the Q&A with the author that is attached to this book listing in Amazon). It is a worthwhile read but its not one that you can read all in one go as there is a lot to take in.