Archive for October 27th, 2008

Via the Boston Globe Ideas section. If you believe what college undergraduates have to say on questionnaires extrapolates at all to the real world. And that people still do things like name their car once they graduate.

“YOU BETTER WATCH what you say about my car. She’s real sensitive.” Nevertheless, unless you run across a car named Christine, there’s nothing to worry about, right? Think again. A study by psychologists at Colorado State University found that almost half of the more than 200 drivers surveyed in a college class had assigned a gender to their car (more females than males) and that over a quarter had given their car a name, including ones like Lolita, the Sweat-box of Death, and Jolly Green Giant. Drivers who had assigned a gender to their car - regardless of whether it was male or female - indicated a greater tendency to driving-related aggression and anger. The students were also asked to assess their car’s personality. The personality ascribed to the car was typically somewhat different than the driver’s, and knowing this invented personality improved predictions of the driver’s aggressiveness.

The study is: Benfield, J. et al., “Driver Personality and Anthropomorphic Attributions of Vehicle Personality Relate to Reported Aggressive Driving Tendencies,” Personality and Individual Differences (January 2007).

Photo by Tom Vanderbilt

A nifty little meditation on the visual language of the street, by Peter Campbell in the LRB (subscribers only; but you should really subscribe).

It begins: “Step into the street, look down, and it tells you what to do. Kerbs and gutters separate walkers from drivers. Painted words, lines and changes of material nudge you forward or make you pause. The street surface shows what is going on underground: scars left by repairs indicate new pipe work; trapdoors, lids, covers and grills point to drains, cables, coal holes and cellars. Signals of activity other than that created by people going from place to place proliferate. Responsibility for all this is diffuse.”

From the NYT I couldn’t help noticing this detail about Brian Vickers, who seems to have followed Jeff Gordon to NYC:

“This stock car driver does not keep a car in New York, and he hates the city’s ultra-heavy traffic.

He does own a sturdy black bicycle, which he has used to explore Manhattan from tip to tip. “This city is so big, with so many neighborhoods,” he said, “and until you get here, you don’t really understand that.”

This bit caught my eye, via Paul Ingrassia’s diagnosis of Detroit’s woes in the WSJ (”a tale of hubris, missed opportunities, disastrous decisions and flawed leadership of almost biblical proportions”):

“For all the Pinto’s infamy, perhaps no car better captured America’s decade-long haplessness than the pug-ugly AMC Gremlin, which debuted in 1970 and died — mercifully — in 1980. The Gremlin’s shape, fittingly, was first sketched out by an American Motors designer on the back of a Northwest Airlines air-sickness bag.”

Story after the jump…
(thanks Jack!)
(more…)