Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Traffic - Why we drive the way we do and....



I've read this book last year, but finally I stopped procrastinating   got time to write a post about it.

It's a really  interesting book, full of curiosities about traffic bevaiour flirting with sociology and economics. Here is the NYT's review



I selected four quotes that I would like to use as an epigraph:

  1. "The problem, as is so often the case in traffic, is that the collective result of everyone’s smart behavior begins to seem, on a larger scale, stupid" p.149

  2. “Traffic patterns are the desire lines of our everyday lives. They show us who we are and where we are going” p. 151

  3. "Traffic is thus a living laboratory of human interaction, a place thriving with subtle displays of implied power. When a light turns green at an intersection, for example, and the car ahead of another driver has not moved, there is some chance that a horn will be sounded. But when that horn will be sounded, for how long and how many times it will be sounded, who will be sounding the horn, and who the horn will be sounded at are not entirely random variables." p.34

  4. "If you look at trip rates by male versus female, and look at that by size of family…the women’s trip rates vary tremendously by size of family. Men’s trip rates look as if they didn’t even know they had a family. The men’s trip rates are almost independent of family size. What it obviously says is that the mother’s the one doing all the hauling." p.135