Tom Vanderbilt Quotes

There is a simple mantra you can carry about you in traffic: When a situation feels dangerous to you, it's probably more safe than you know; when a situation feels safe, that is precisely when you should feel on guard. Most crashes, after all, happen on dry roads, on clear, sunny days, to sober drivers.

The relative ease of most driving lures us into thinking we can get away with doing other things. Indeed, those other things, like listening to the radio, can help when driving itself is threatening to cause fatigue. But we buy into the myth of multitasking with little actual knowledge of how much we can really add in or, as with the television news, how much we are missing. As the inner life of the driver begins to come into focus, it is becoming clear not only that distraction is the single biggest problem on the road but that we have little concept of just how distracted we are.

Traffic is more of the in between time where we think more about where we are going than where we are at the moment.

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.

'Can you imagine, 30 years ago, saying nobody will make coffee at home?' Nancy McGuckin, a travel researcher in Washington, D.C.

The anxious positioning Bourdieu had noted could be felt in a tweeted "humblebrag," an attempt to claim cultural capital without looking as if one were doing so.

Gut feelings help us filter the world, and what is taste, really, but a kind of cognitive mechanism for managing sensory overload? But

The road itself tells us far more than signs do.

What makes a good judge? Confidence for one. An expert, in Shanteau's view, is someone good at convincing others he or she is an expert. Good judges may make small errors, but they will "generally avoid large mistakes." When they encounter exceptions, experts are good at making"single-case deviations in their decision patterns." Novices, meanwhile, tend to stick stubbornly to the rules, even when they are inappropriate.

The way humans hunt for parking and the way animals hunt for food are not as different as you might think.

Drivers should not drive more than a minute without having a (purposefully-designed) curve.

In America, a pedestrian is someone who has just parked their car.

As Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert argues, 'You can't adapt to commuting, because it's entirely unpredictable. Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day.'

Men may or may not be better drivers than women, but they seem to die more often trying to prove that they are.

Traffic was as much an emotional problem as it was a mechanical one.

When a situation feels dangerous to you, it's probably more safe than you know; when a situation feels safe, that is precisely when you should feel on guard.

Experts are people who have the same opinions as other experts.