Traffic forever

I read this book review in the Sunday New York Times about a book called "Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us)." Though it's not so much a review as the Cliff's Notes version of the book. I feel like after reading this review that the book is awesome, but I also feel like the book can't give me anymore than the review just gave me.

The book just proves that human beings are idiots. As if we needed a book review to tell us this.

An alternate title for the book might be “Idiots.” Vanderbilt, who writes regularly about design and technology, cites a finding that 12.7 percent of the traffic slowdown after a crash has nothing to do with wreckage blocking lanes; it’s caused by gawkers. Rubberneckers attend to the spectacle so avidly that they themselves then get into accidents, slamming into the car in front of them when it brakes to get a better look or dig out a cellphone to take a picture. (This happens often enough for traffic types to have coined a word for it: “digi-necking.”) Exasperated highway professionals have actually tried erecting anti-rubbernecking screens around the scenes of accidents, but the vehicle toting the screen typically gets caught in the traffic jam it’s meant to prevent.

Moreover, Vanderbilt adds, “there is the interest in the screen itself.” Drivers will slow down to look at anything: “Something as simple as a couch dumped in a roadside ditch can send minor shudders of curiosity through the traffic flow.”