Except for two very brief occasions, I haven’t been behind the wheel of a car in four years. But this book looks fascinating: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), by Tom Vanderbilt.
The entire prologue is online. An excerpt:
You may suspect that getting people to merge in a timely fashion, and without killing one another, is less of a traffic problem and more of a human problem. The road, more than simply a system of regulations and designs, is a place where many millions of us, with only loose parameters for how to behave, are thrown together daily in a kind of massive petri dish in which all kinds of uncharted, little-understood dynamics are at work. There is no other place where so many people from different walks of life–different ages, races, classes, religions, genders, political preferences, lifestyle choices, levels of psychological stability–mingle so freely.
Another:
[I]t is actually an incredibly complex and demanding task: We are navigating through a legal system, we are becoming social actors in a spontaneous setting, we are processing a bewildering amount of information, we are constantly making predictions and calculations and on-the-fly judgments of risk and reward, and we’re engaging in a huge amount of sensory and cognitive activity–the full scope of which scientists are just beginning to understand.
Finally:
Traffic has even shaped the food we eat. “One-handed convenience†is the mantra, with forkless foods like Taco Bell’s hexagonal Crunchwrap Supreme, designed “to handle well in the car.â€
Makes me think of those obese humans hovercrafting their way around the mother ship in WALL-E.
I like driving, but only if there’s practically no other traffic. I get very, very nervous when there are cars behind me, or coming toward me in the next lane. And changing lanes terrifies me, so I do whatever I can to avoid highways.
Unfortunately, living in the God-foresaken wasteland I’m currently trapped in (Westchester) one cannot do without a car.
The proposition of every person owning their own car — and all of the resources that such a situation requires — is staggering in its wastefulness. Sure, you lose the independence and ability to go wherever you want whenever you want, but mass transit makes so much more sense — both economically and environmentally.
But that’s not how America works.