Tom Vanderbilt Quotes

#1. Knowing where to look - and remembering what you have seen - is a hallmark of experience and expertise.

Tom Vanderbilt

#2. 'Can you imagine, 30 years ago, saying nobody will make coffee at home?' Nancy McGuckin, a travel researcher in Washington, D.C.

Tom Vanderbilt

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. Intersections are crash magnets.

Tom Vanderbilt

#6. The anxious positioning Bourdieu had noted could be felt in a tweeted "humblebrag," an attempt to claim cultural capital without looking as if one were doing so.

Tom Vanderbilt

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

Tom Vanderbilt

#8. When a situation feels dangerous to you, it's probably more safe than you know; when a situation feels safe, that is precisely when you should feel on guard.

Tom Vanderbilt

#9. In America, a pedestrian is someone who has just parked their car.

Tom Vanderbilt

#10. Gut feelings help us filter the world, and what is taste, really, but a kind of cognitive mechanism for managing sensory overload? But

Tom Vanderbilt

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. Traffic was as much an emotional problem as it was a mechanical one.

Tom Vanderbilt

#14. The way humans hunt for parking and the way animals hunt for food are not as different as you might think.

Tom Vanderbilt

#15. 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

#16. Many traffic signs have become like placebos, giving false comfort to the afflicted, or simple boilerplate to ward off lawsuits, the roadway version of the Kellogg's Pop-Tarts box that says, Warning: Pastry Filling May Be Hot When Heated.

Tom Vanderbilt

#17. The pursuit of a kind of absolute safety, above all other considerations of what makes places good environments, has not only made those streets and cities less attractive, it has, in many cases, made them less safe.

Tom Vanderbilt

#18. John Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places (New York: Walker and Co., 1998), 94.

Tom Vanderbilt

#19. Experts are people who have the same opinions as other experts.

Tom Vanderbilt

#20. The road itself tells us far more than signs do.

Tom Vanderbilt

#21. Human attention, in the best of circumstances, is a fluid but fragile entity. Beyond a certain threshold, the more that is asked of it, the less well it performs. When this happens in a psychological experiment, it is interesting. When it happens in traffic, it can be fatal.

Tom Vanderbilt