Tom Vanderbilt, a journalist, explains in his book "Traffic" that the world's roads are a desperately complicated space, socially and psychologically.
The left-hand-turn rule has long mystified drivers, said Samuel I. Schwartz, a traffic consultant who used three pages in his book, "Traffic Puzzles," to explain it.
As Tom Vanderbilt describes Monderman's strategy in his book Traffic, "Rather than clarity and segregation, he had created confusion and ambiguity".
In a consideration of future mobility, Tom Vanderbilt, author of the book "Traffic," compared the emerging mix of urban transportation systems to the early Internet, with its membership, sign-ups and hit-and-miss access.
And so the book traffics back and forth, with sublime indecision, between the need to stand firm, in Emersonian majesty, and the yearning to break one's pose and join the more crowded landscape of mankind.
The book traffics in a fair amount of academic language, but Nelson perverts the staid stuff with an intimate tone that intertwines quotations, close readings of the work, and plain old feeling.
Vanderbilt's widely admired previous book, "Traffic," examined a dangerous and complex activity that people pay about as much attention to while they're doing it as they do to washing the dishes: driving a car.
They also made a list of the bad things that happened, including no gas cap on their rented car; they were unable to get Unit 21 in their hotel, though they had specifically requested it; Asher forgot to bring his binoculars & his bird book; traffic had become murderous at night on the South Dixie Highway; the movie "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice".
He's the guy who wore a paisley-patterned suit to a 2011 poetry jam at the White House and read, in front of the president, an excerpt from his book Traffic, a transcription of 24 hours of traffic reports from a New York radio station.
"Being afraid of highway driving, or driving itself, is certainly not an irrational fear, given that for most people, driving in general is the riskiest thing they'll probably do in their life," said Tom Vanderbilt, author of the new book, "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do" (Knopf).
