CONTACTTRAFFICABOUT TOM VANDERBILTOTHER WRITING CONTACT ABOUT THE BOOK

Archive for April 22nd, 2009

Connectedness

As the above map, from the New Scientist, shows, a remarkable extent of the world is now covered in roads.

In fact, very little of the world’s land can now be thought of as inaccessible, according to a new map of connectedness created by researchers at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, and the World Bank.

Relatedly, I was sent a link to an interesting looking new film, Division Street, by Eric Bendick, which seems to deal with the presence of roads in the landscape and the environmental implications.

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Posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 3:05 pm by: Tom Vanderbilt
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The Car Garden

As an American land art enthusiast I, like many others, have spent hours trekking down desert roads to get Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, or Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, but Tom Merkel’s insane, insipred Car Garden, 1200 cars (and whatever was inside of them at the time they were acquired) out rusting on a California hillside, was new to me.

Via Car and Driver:

The major conglomeration, though, is a mile-long, four-lane clot of cars that snake through the garden with some precision. That’s the Lost Highway.

“The massive 20th-century time-capsule monument project, the Lost Highway, came about by happenstance,” he told me in a long handwritten letter (he doesn’t own a typewriter or a computer). “My folks had both died when I was 21, and to fill the emotional void, I had compulsive preservation . . .

“The four-lane, mile-long time-line traffic jam, vignettes, et cetera, are very much a massive time capsule from the 20th century—and a very honest one in that it’s honestly representational . . . . After all, everyone didn’t drive Mustangs, woodies, and ‘34 Ford hot rods in the years following World War II as the movies would lead us to believe. Yet that’s all the young kids get to see.

“The work in progress is basically the 20th-century equivalent of the Chinese clay soldiers,” he rambled forth, referring to the astounding Terracotta Army of more than 6000 life-size statues uncovered by peasants in 1974 that for 2200 years have guarded the massive tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huang near the city of Xi’an.

The Lost Highway is “a deliberate ruin, a cultural time capsule of sorts, a celebration of Southern California auto culture intended for the study and enjoyment of generations to come.

Its location is rather jealously guarded, though things magazine throws down the gauntlet to find it on Google Earth. Anyone got the coordinates?

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Posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 12:26 pm by: Tom Vanderbilt
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World’s First Photo Enforcement Murder?

Via the Arizona Republic.

The shooting prompted both companies that operate photo-enforcement programs in the area to pull the mobile units from highways and roads while they reassess security measures.

(Thanks Ed)

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Posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 10:56 am 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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