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| Titre : | Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) |
| Auteurs : | Tom Vanderbilt |
| Type de document : | document électronique |
| Editeur : | [S.l.] : Knopf Canada, 2009 |
| ISBN/ISSN/EAN : | 978-0-307-39773-7 |
| Index. décimale : | 629.28 (Fonctionnement, entretien, r├®parations, conduite) |
| Résumé : |
"### Amazon.com Review *while* driving), but I can't remember the last time I saw a book on all the time we spend stuck in our cars. It's a topic of nearly universal interest, though: everybody has a strategy for beating the traffic. Tom Vanderbilt's *Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)* has plenty of advice for those shortcut schemers (Vanderbilt may well convince you to become, as he has, a dreaded ""Late Merger""), but more than that it's the sort of wide-ranging contrarian compendium that makes a familiar subject new. I'm not the first or last to call *Traffic* the *Freakonomics* of cars, but it's true that it fits right in with the school of smart and popular recent books by Leavitt, Gladwell, Surowiecki, Ariely, and others that use the latest in economic, sociological, psychological, and in this case civil engineering research to make us rethink a topic we live with every day. Want to know how much city traffic is just people looking for parking? (It's a lot.) Or why street signs don't work (but congestion pricing does), why new cars crash more than old cars, and why Saturdays now have the worst traffic of the week? Read *Traffic*, or better yet, listen to the audio book on your endless commute. *--Tom Nissley* **Questions for Tom Vanderbilt, author of *Traffic*** **Q: Was this book really born on a New Jersey highway?** A: Yes, though it could have been any highway in the world, where countless drivers, driving on a crowded road that is about to lose a lane, have had to make a simple decision: When to merge. For my entire driving life, I had always merged ""early,"" thinking it was the polite and efficient thing to do. I viewed those who kept driving to the merge point, to the front of line, as selfish jerks who were making life miserable for the rest of us. I began to wonder: Were they really making things worse? Was I making things worse? Could merging be made easier? Why were there late mergers and early mergers, and why did people get so worked up about the whole thing? In that everyday moment I seemed to sense a vast, largely under-explored wilderness before me: Traffic. **Q: Is it true that the most common cause of stress on the highway is merging? Why of the myriad things to cause stress on the road is this at the top?** A: Merging is the most stressful single activity we face in everyday driving, according to a survey by the Texas Transportation Institute. People who have done studies at highway construction work zones have also told me of extraordinarily bad behavior, triggered by this simple act of trying to get two lanes of traffic into one. Sometimes, itÔÇÖs simply the difficult mechanics of driving ÔÇö trying to enter a stream of traffic flowing at a higher speed than you are, for example. Drivers, to quote a physicist who was actually talking about grains, are objects ""who do not easily interact."" But I also think thereÔÇÖs something about the forward flow of traffic that makes us register progress only by our own unimpeded movement; as in life, we seem to register losses more powerfully than gains, and registering these losses boosts stress. **Q: You say that, ""For most of us who are not brain surgeons, driving is probably the most complex everyday thing we do in our lives."" How so?** A: Researchers have estimated there are anywhere from 1500 to 2500 discrete skills and activities we undertake while driving. Even the simplest thing ÔÇö shifting gears ÔÇö is a decision-making process consuming what is called ""cognitive workload."" WeÔÇÖre operating heavy machinery at speeds beyond our long evolutionary history, absorbing (and discarding) huge amounts of information, and having to make snap decisions ÔÇö often based on limited situational awareness, guesses about what others are going to do, or a hazy knowledge of the actual traffic law. It took years of research, for example, by some of the countryÔÇÖs top robotics researchers, to create expensive, sophisticated self-driving ""autonomous vehicles"" that are basically mediocre beginning drivers that youÔÇÖd never want to let loose in everyday traffic. When we forget that driving isnÔÇÖt necessarily as easy as it seems to be, we get into trouble. **Q: Drivers polled in America say the roads are getting less civil with each passing year. ÔÇÿRoad RageÔÇÖ is an ever more common term. What is to blame? Hummers? Or are we just getting ruder?** A: Every year, more people are driving more miles, so one reason for the sense that the roads are getting less civil is simply that there are many more chances for you to have an encounter with an aggressive or rude driver. ItÔÇÖs tough to put numbers on it, but I happen to feel, like many people, that behavior has gotten qualitatively worse ÔÇö surveys have suggested, for example, that using the turn signal is an increasingly optional activity. Leaving aside the issue that not signaling is illegal (because, letÔÇÖs face it, weÔÇÖre never going to be able ticket everyone who doesnÔÇÖt do it, nor do we probably want to), itÔÇÖs one of those small things, requiring little effort from the driver, that makes traffic flow more smoothly ÔÇö I myself have honked countless times at ""idiots"" slowing for no apparent reason, only to seem them eventually make a turn. ItÔÇÖs antisocial behavior, the equivalent of having the door held open for you and saying nothing in return. So why donÔÇÖt people signal? My immediate theory is that theyÔÇÖre using a cell phone and are distracted or physically incapable of signaling. But a deeper reason, I suspect, may be seen in the surveys of psychologists who measure narcissism in American culture. They find, as time goes on, more people are willing to say things like ""If I ruled the world, it would be a better place."" Traffic is filled with people who think that roads belong only to them ÔÇö itÔÇÖs ""MySpace"" ÔÇö that being inside the car absolves them from any obligation to anyone else. People are glad to tell you that their child is a middle school honor student ÔÇö as if anyone cared! ÔÇö but they deem it less important to tell you what theyÔÇÖre going to do in traffic. **Q: So much of what you uncover about life on the road seems counterintuitive. Like the fact that drivers drive closer to oncoming cars when there is a center line divider then when there is not; that most accidents happen close to home in familiar, not foreign, surroundings; that dangerous roads can be safer; safer cars can be more dangerous; that suburbs are often riskier than the inner city; the roundabout safer than the intersection. When it comes to traffic why are things so different from how we instinctively perceive them?** A: I think part of the reason is itÔÇÖs easy for us to confuse what feels dangerous or safe in the moment and what might be, in a larger sense, safe or dangerous. We have a windshieldÔÇÖs eye view of driving that sometimes blinds us to larger realities or skews our perception. Roundabouts feel dangerous because of all the work one has to do, like looking for an opening, jockeying for positioning. But itÔÇÖs precisely because we have to do all that, and because of the way roundabouts are designed, that we have to slow down. By contrast, it feels quite ""safe"" to sail through a big intersection where the lights are telling you that you have the right to speed through. We can, in essence, put our brain on hold. But those same intersections contain so many more chances for what engineers call ""conflict,"" and at much higher speeds, than roundabouts. So when what seems quite safe suddenly turns quite dangerous ÔÇö will we be as well prepared? Similarly, we might be reassured that that yellow or white dividing line on a road is telling us where we should be, but how does that knowledge then change our behavior, to the point where may actually be driving closer ÔÇö and faster ÔÇö to the stream of oncoming traffic? Accidents are more likely to occur closer to home. Mostly this is because we do most driving closer to home, but studies do show that we pay less attention to signs and signals on local roads, because we ""know"" them, yet this knowledge actually give us a false sense of security. **Q: What were some of the things that most surprised you in researching this book?** A: Things that surprised me the most were those that challenged my own long-held beliefs as a driver, like that ""late mergers"" simply must be somehow worse for the traffic flow at work-zones, that roundabouts were dangerous places, that warning signs were there because they must be working, that car drivers were more of a contributing factor in truck-car crashes than truck drivers. It was also quite a revelation to learn about the many ways our eyes and our minds deceive us while driving, the ways we ""look but donÔÇÖt see,"" the way we sometimes believe, to slightly change up the warning our mirrors gives us, that objects are further away than they actually are. Then there were the things I had never really thought about, but were surprising nonetheless ÔÇö that drivers seem to pass closer to cyclists when those cyclists are wearing helmets, how the ways in which drivers honk at each other contain subtle indications of status and demographics, how much traffic on the streets is simply people looking for parking. I was also unpleasantly surprised to learn how far the U.S. had slipped in terms of traffic safety in the world, where it was once the leader. **Q: You write, ""The truth is the road itself tells us far more than signs do."" So do traffic signs work?** A: WeÔÇÖve probably all had the somewhat absurd moment of driving in the country, past a big red barn, the pungent smell of cow manure on the breeze, and then seeing a yellow traffic sign with a cow on it. Does anyone need that sign to remind them that cows may be nearby? To quote Hans Monderman, the legendary Dutch traffic engineer w |
