osaraba | Entries tagged with books:vanderbilt

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Video of traffic at the intersection of 28th & Park shows the "bad habits" of pedestrians, cyclists & motorists. I don't think I agree that this necessarily calls for a revision of street traffic rules in NYC (pedestrians are pretty darn safe in metropolitan NYC), but this video is super fun to watch nonetheless!

I love the point (toward the end) when the videographer labels the "Agressive Yield" of the car toward the pedestrians. Yeah, have to say I really really hate it when drivers do that (though I will admit to having done that myself a handful of times).

This makes me want to re-read Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt.

An exerpt from the book I'm currently reading, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt:

In Finalnd, which has one of the lowest crash rates in the world, drivers are given fines based on a complicated calculus primarily involving their after-tax income. The law, intended to counter the regressive nature of speeding tickets (they take up a larger part of a poor person's income than a rich person's), has led to some very high-profile speeding tickets, such as Internet entrepreneur Jaakko Rystölä's $71,400 tab for going 43 miles per hour in a 25-mile-per-hour zone. There has been some grumbling, especially among the wealthy, but the law remains popular; in 2001, the legislature overwhelmingly rejected a cap on fines. Women seem to find the fine more fair than men (this is interesting for several reasons, which I will return to shortly). But what's remarkable about sliding-scale speeding tickets is not necessarily whether they get people to slow down. It's that in Finland legislators have the confidence to pass laws that unilaterally impose high costs on breaking the law, that traffic police will actually issue fines rather than accept what in theory could be a huge bribe, and that the public, by and large, feels all this is fair.

This is from a sub-section entitled "Danger: Corruption Ahead - the Secret Indicator of Crazy Traffic".

I'm just going to state again HOW AWESOME THIS BOOK IS.

Sadly, I'm very close to the end. The last 100 pages is bibliography and notes, so it isn't as long as it looks. But it's comprehensive and entertaining as well as being informative and educational. Vanderbilt really knows how to make analogies that aren't too simplistic, but still get the point across in layman's terms. His stories of interviews and days spent with traffic engineers, traffic reporters, economists, government agents, and scientists of animal behavior(!) is well-written, entertaining, and funny. I really can't get enough of this.

Even if you don't drive, this book is fascinating. I spent an hour or two reading aloud to Maryann one night -- the chapter comparing traffic flow with the habits of ant colonies vs. locusts. Yes, FASCINATING. If I'd read this book while still in high school... I kind of think I would have wanted to become a traffic engineer.

Hopefully Vanderbilt has written other essays/books on this topic. For I will search them out!

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