CONTACTTRAFFICABOUT TOM VANDERBILTOTHER WRITING CONTACT ABOUT THE BOOK

Archive for June 4th, 2009

The Hummer Death Watch Begins

That’s what I’m taking away from this WSJ piece.

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Posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 4:24 pm by: Tom Vanderbilt
4 Comments. Click here to leave a comment.

Horse Sense

I was intrigued by these remarks from Peter Gordon:

I have just finished reading The Horse in the City (by Clay McShane and Joel Tarr), which does a fine job documenting what went on (in American cities) between the years of the “pedestrian city” and the “automotive city”. The book is a fascinating bit of research on modern urban history.

We learn, for example, that “In 1890, 9,163 establishments manufactured carriages and wagons or their parts, employing more than 90,000 workers to make over one million vehicles worth over $32 million.” (p. 31).

But GM sold just over 2-million vehicles in 2005. The Detroit Big-3 sold 5.33 million. The U.S. population in 2005 was about 4.7 times that in 1890. The ratio of vehicles then and now is 1:5.33. So we are in the ballpark. But McShane and Tarr make no mention of demands for bail-outs or nationalization because the industry of its day was “too big to fail.”

Any old hansom cab builders out there care to comment?

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Posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 4:10 pm by: Tom Vanderbilt
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Commute Was Not a Noun Until 1960

David Levinson ruminates on the origins of the word “commute.” Like the word “traffic,” it seems to have had a strictly commercial orientation (to commute money at a currency exchange) originally, but then expanded to include the flow of people, not just goods.

I hadn’t seen this bit of E.B. White verse:

One who spends his life

In riding to and from his wife;

A man who shaves and takes a train,

And then rides back to shave again.

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Posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 7:53 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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