Tom Vanderbilt QUOTES

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

― Tom Vanderbilt , Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

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

― Tom Vanderbilt , Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

6 " 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.' "

― Tom Vanderbilt , Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

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

― Tom Vanderbilt , Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

10 " That word, which has an almost entirely pejorative meaning today as a hopelessly superficial dabbler, is derived from the Italian dilettare, which means “to delight.” As the art historian Bruce Redford notes, “dilettante”—one who exhibits delight—entered English with the formation of the Society of Dilettanti, an eighteenth-century group of Englishmen who had returned from the grand tour brimming with enthusiasm for Continental art and culture. As the process of acquiring knowledge gradually became more specialized, Redford notes, the meaning of the word shifted. By the time George Eliot wrote Middlemarch in the early 1870s, the word had become an insult. "

― Tom Vanderbilt , Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

12 " A gulf was opening. Unless you were a professional, you were a mere dilettante or an "amateur." And what did this loaded word originally signify? "To love," derived from the French aimer. With the increasing specialization of knowledge and professionalization of everyday life, suddenly being delighted by something, or loving something, was seen as vaguely disreputable. "

― Tom Vanderbilt , Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

14 " It's probably no accident that whenever one hears of a smart technology, it refers to something that has been taken out of human control. "

― Tom Vanderbilt , Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

16 " This raises the interesting, if seemingly outlandish, question of why car drivers, virtually alone among users of wheeled transport, do not wear helmets. Yes, cars do provide a nice metal cocoon with inflatable cushions. But in Australia, for example, head injuries among car occupants, according to research by the Federal Office of Road Safety, make up half the country’s traffic-injury costs. Helmets, cheaper and more reliable than side-impact air bags, would reduce injuries and cut fatalities by some 25 percent.95 A crazy idea, perhaps, but so were air bags once. "

― Tom Vanderbilt , Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

18 " This is the reason the whole ‘keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel, use the hands-free handset’ idea is a silly thing,” Simons said. “Having your eyes on the road doesn’t do any good unless your attention is on the road too. "

― Tom Vanderbilt , Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

20 " 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. "

― Tom Vanderbilt , Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us