CONTACTTRAFFICABOUT TOM VANDERBILTOTHER WRITING CONTACT ABOUT THE BOOK

Archive for April 9th, 2009

Connecting the Dots

Photo by Patpatz/Flickr

On a drive to Palo Alto this morning on the 101 South, I couldn’t help notice that inexorable feature of California highway life: “Botts’ Dots.” I knew that they were named for CALTRANS engineer Elbert D. Botts, but I wasn’t aware of their curious historical lineage, via this article:

Raised reflective pavement markers capture light from oncoming headlights and reflect this light back to drivers for guidance at night and in weather with poor visibility. They are a familiar feature on many California freeways. Their origins can be traced to the ingenuity of British civilians trying to cope with the imposition of blackouts during bombing raids in World War II. Night drivers were required to shield the top of their headlights with blinders. This drastically cut down on the night drivers’ vision on the roadways. Someone came up with the idea of placing reflective markers on the roadways which would be visible only to drivers. These were soon nicknamed “cats’ eyes” because of how they appeared to drivers on the darkened roadways.”

Curiously, as the story goes, the “rumble strip” aspect of the dots — i.e., they would alert a driver if he was drifting across lanes — was an unintended benefit.

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Posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 10:34 pm by: Tom Vanderbilt
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Parents Stopping Parents

At a number of schools in Los Angeles, parents are being press-ganged into serving as traffic safety officials to help protect kids from … other parents, driving kids to school.

From January to November 2008, there were 153 traffic-related injuries around schools, which Los Angeles public school officials said was much higher than five years ago, though they could not provide data for prior years…

…Increased traffic around schools has vexed other major cities, too. Nationwide, roughly 21 percent of morning traffic is generated by parents driving children to school, said Raquel Rivas, a spokeswoman for Safe Routes to School, a national organization formed to encourage walking and bicycling to school.

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Posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 10:19 pm by: Tom Vanderbilt
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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

Please send tips, news, research papers, links, photos (bad road signs, outrageous bumper stickers, spectacularly awful acts of driving or parking or anything traffic-related), or ideas for my Slate.com Transport column to me at: info@howwedrive.com.

For publicity inquiries, please contact Kate Runde at Vintage: krunde@randomhouse.com.

For editorial inquiries, please contact Zoe Pagnamenta at The Zoe Pagnamenta Agency: zoe@zpagency.com.

For speaking engagement inquiries, please contact
Jenna Meulemans at the Knopf Speaker Bureau.

Order Traffic from:

Amazon | B&N | Borders
Random House | Powell’s

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U.S. Paperback UK Paperback
Traffic UK
Drive-on-the-left types can order the book from Amazon.co.uk.

For UK publicity enquiries please contact Rosie Glaisher at Penguin.

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