Listening to Traffic

Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic, was on Minnesota Public Radio's Midmorning show this morning for an hour. (You can find a link to the audio here.) This is the guy I wrote about briefly at an earlier point, whose How We Drive blog is so interesting.

The hour's discussion covered merging, speeding, construction zones, and whether people with bumper stickers are more prone to road rage. Vanderbilt has done a lot of background research on human behavior, which informs his take on our behavior in traffic. He's basically a synthesizer and popularizer of a lot of nitty-gritty research most of us would find too boring to read.

One phenomenon he mentioned was called the "actor observer effect" -- which has to do with how we interpret a circumstance differently if it happens to us rather than if we observe it happening to someone else. Or, to paraphrase George Carlin, all the other drivers are idiots who drive too slow or maniacs who drive too fast.

I really need to get my hands on Vanderbilt's book.