Traffic is both vindicating and disheartening for people such as myself who fancy themselves excellent drivers. I found myself frequently quoting passages from Vanderbilt's lengthy tome to prove to my spouse that, as I had previously observed but had no empirical evidence to support, other people's poor driving habits endanger me and anyone else forced to share the roads with those idiots. However, as I read on I would inevitably get silent as he described other dangerous driving habits that I have (on rare occasions, of course) been guilty of.

Although road engineering and safety features in automobiles are discussed, Vanderbilt makes a convincing case that ultimately human behavior determines accident rates. Anytime engineers find a way to make driving safer or traffic flow more smoothly people will inevitably find a way to crash or cause congestion.

This book is a meticulously researched wake up call that every driver should read. Unfortunately, despite the fact that this book is creeping up the Times best seller list, many people will not. Although written in clear prose and filled with amusing person anecdotes, this book does require some concentration and dedication to get through. It is well researched (as the lengthy notes section at the end demonstrates), and consequently is quite long and contains a lot of numbers and statistics. It is doubtful that a person who cannot concentrate on the driving task will be able to make it through this book. Interested parties will be rewarded however... or at least will have some interesting things to discuss on their cell phones while driving to work.

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Much of what we believe about traffic is wrong. The author effectively drives that point home at many times throughout this book. He converted me on two issues: roundabouts and cell phone usage while driving. I still hate driving through roundabouts, but I regret my neighborhood's pressure to put in a stop light instead of a roundabout ate an intersection by a school in our neighborhood. Looking back, I was wrong in my belief the traffic light would provide more safety for the hordes of children walking to school through the intersection every day.

I've also given up cell phones while I drive. I did believe I was compensating while talking, but I was, in fact, doing exactly what the author said cell phone users do: drive like a teenager by fixating on the road in front of me. I wonder though, how they differ from having a conversation with a passenger.

I do think he got one issue backwards. He briefly mentioned red light cameras as improving safety, but I've read they typically increase the accident rates at intersections because they increase rear end collisions caused by people slamming on their brakes to avoid a ticket.

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Very interesting, though the material did not cover the same info as the author gave in interviews. I have become a later merger.

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Although this is a fascinating and very educational book, it was not always an easy read. But it was a very worthwhile read. The author goes into great detail about many subjects we all thought were true, but aren't. As such, you sometimes have to read carefully. While listed as 402 pages long, there are only 286 pages of text. Most of the rest is footnotes and citations.

Basically, the book covers two major areas. First, many of the safety features added to road and cars often make driving more dangerous. And he provides the evidence from numerous studies to prove this. Second, many of the things most of us believe about our driving habits, choices of vehicles and safety concerns are wrong. For example, SUVs are not safer than smaller cars. In fact, they are involved in more accidents. Here are just some of the tidbits from the book:

In the New York City of 1867, horses were killing four pedestrians a week, a bit higher than today's rate of traffic fatalities.

The farther away things are, like an approaching car, the worse we are at estimating distance. But we still pass cars ahead of us which are actually doing the speed limit.

People 'foraging' for parking spaces in a big lot seldom choose the best spot. The author shows you how to do so.

The expensive cars we buy spend 95 percent of their time parked. This results in the economic and environmental high cost of 'free parking.' And, for some reason, banks with drive-up windows are required to have more parking spaces than banks without.

Intersections are crash-magnets. Thirty percent of all road crashes occur at intersections. At a four-way intersection there 56 danger points. Of these, 32 are for vehicles and 24 are for pedestrians. Whereas, round-abouts only have a total of 16, but we believe they are more dangerous than intersections.

Finland has one of the safest set of roads in the world. In that country, traffic fines are based on your income. One rich Finn was fined $71,400 for doing 43 mph in a 25-mph zone. And corruption (bribes to traffic police) plays a role too. When Mexico City replaced all it male traffic cops with females, the number of tickets issued rose by 300% and drivers started obeying traffic laws.

Everyone knows United Nation diplomats in New York City are exempt from traffic tickets. So much so that between 1997 and 2002, they accumulated 150,000 tickets. But in London, England, the largest number of ignored traffic tickets are by diplomats from the U.S. embassy.

Unlike the general perception, most traffic accident between cars and trucks are caused by the car drivers. Which is really stupid, as guess which drivers are killed the most.

If you drive an average of 15,500 miles per year, and many American do, there is a roughly one in 100 chance you'll die in a fatal car crash over a lifetime of 50 of driving. But we often don't obey traffic laws. Plus more children are killed in cars while being driven to school than those who walk there.

If you crash at 50 mph, you are 15 times more likely to die than in a crash at 25 mph. Yet most of us speed.

We often buy pickup trucks because they are bigger and therefore safer. Yet more people in the U.S. die in pickup trucks per million vehicles registered than in any other kind of vehicle.

A 1994 report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concluded that the overall effect of Anti-lock Braking Systems on crashes---fatal and otherwise---was 'close to zero.'

In the town I live in, I sometimes think I'm the only one obeying the speed limits. When I am doing so in a 45-mph-zone, cars are passing me like I'm doing 25 mph. And some of those cars are pulling trailers. Since 9/11, to when this book was published in 2008, no one in the U.S. was killed by a terrorist. Yet traffic police are being pulled off the streets to combat terrorism. Meanwhile, on the average, 40,000 Americans are killed in traffic accidents every year. And hundreds of thousands are injured, often seriously. The economic cost to our society is beyond calculation. Yet, if strict traffic laws were mandated, we would rise up, protest and even vote our leaders out of office. Go figure.

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