I finished up reading Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do by Tom Vanderbilt last week and enjoyed it. It’s interesting to see how much the people part affects traffic. One of the opening segments is about whether you are an “early merger” or “late merger”, and how early mergers get irritated at late mergers for ‘not playing by the rules’ – but it works out that late merging in generally best. We just don’t have that shared rule and it leads to chaos. The book talks about more signs are not necessarily better, and shows some cases where removing signs made things better. It also says that there are almost always unintended consequences of changes to roads, signals, and signs. You fix one thing and it changes behavior for the worse in another. Did you know roads are deliberately designed to never be straight for more than a short length to keep drivers engaged? Or that a roundabout works out to be safer than a traffic light because drivers perceive it as dangerous and pay more attention? Or that it’s always the other guy, whether you’re the driver or the pedestrian? You might learn some things about yourself while you read about traffic, and I think it’s a great book because it shows you that it’s not always simple to fix problems.

Highly recommended! Paperback version due out Aug 11 if you want to save a few bucks, and the author has a blog as well.