Tom Vanderbilt Quotes

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

Tom Vanderbilt

#2. 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

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

Tom Vanderbilt

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

Tom Vanderbilt

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

Tom Vanderbilt

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. In order to have friends, you must first be one.

Elbert Hubbard

#9. 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

#10. The nice thing about life," said Miss Etta, "is you never know when there's going to be a party.

Earl Hamner Jr.

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

Tom Vanderbilt

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

Tom Vanderbilt

#13. 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

#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

#15. War then, is a relation - not between man and man but between state and state and individuals are enemies only accidentally not as men, nor even as citizens but as soldiers not as members of their country, but as its defenders

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#16. 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

#17. Because for Amy, love was like drugs or booze or porn: There was no plateau. Each exposure needed to be more intense than the last to achieve the same result.

Gillian Flynn

#18. 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

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

Tom Vanderbilt

#20. 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

#21. A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband:

Anonymous

#22. Intersections are crash magnets.

Tom Vanderbilt

#23. There may be aliens in our Milky Way galaxy, and there are billions of other galaxies. The probability is almost certain that there is life somewhere in space.

Buzz Aldrin

#24. 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

#25. The rules of war for federal court were contained in the 86 rules of federal civil procedure, the rules of the local federal court, and the courtroom rules of the particular federal judge.

Kenneth Eade

#26. 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

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

Tom Vanderbilt

#28. What we understand and love understands and loves us also.

Robert Walser

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

Tom Vanderbilt

#30. The journey of the dark night of the soul is where we learn who we are, without people telling us.

Adele Green

#31. I wish thy lot, now bad, still worse, my friend, for when at worst, they say, things always mend.

John Owen