Traffic

I've got this book called "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do". It's a fun, interesting book. I might have written about it before. I don't remember. But even if I did, its worth repeating. Here are some interesting tidbits from it.

• A light turns green, but the car in front doesn't move. Do you honk? Studies show that if the driver of the blocking car is a woman, more drivers - including women- would honk than when it was a man. When the blocking car was high-status, the driver behind was less likely to honk.
• Chronic lane changers (I hate them) gain only an average of four minutes in an eighty minute drive.
• They caution you to slow down in work zones. It turns out that 85% of deaths are those in the car, not the workers.
• In a multitude of studies, when drivers are asked to rank themselves, the majority rank themselves as better than average. Mathematically unlikely.
• Studies show that pedestrians think drivers can see them up to twice as far away as drivers actually do.
• Traffic engineers are increasingly lengthening the "all-red phase" because more people cannot seem to stop on red. (I had them, too.)
• For some reason, regardless where you live in the world, the average commute time throughout the world is 1.1 hours.
• Studies show that satisfaction with one's commute begins to drop off a around thirty minutes each way.
• In the 1950's 40% of drives were related to work. Now it is at 16%.
• Accidents cause slowdowns. That is because people slow down to see what happened. It's worse now because of cell phone cameras.

That's 10. I better stop. But I've got more for next edition.