CONTACTTRAFFICABOUT TOM VANDERBILTOTHER WRITING CONTACT ABOUT THE BOOK

Archive for June 11th, 2009

No Bailout Required for This Car Company

Meet the best-selling car in America, for the past three decades.

It was designed, ironically, by a former Chrysler designer.

Note the Cars style revisions to the latest model, which strangely re-anthromorphizes the car (the headlights already being a pair of “eyes”) with a friendly pair of eyes — a bit strange for the device which will go on to represent the greatest risk of accidental death in their life.

And note the gender-specifying project at work.

Which does make me wonder why we don’t see more pink cars, like this one I snapped in London (with matching dice):

(via Autoblog, horn honk to Braulio)

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Posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 2:01 pm by: Tom Vanderbilt
6 Comments. Click here to leave a comment.

‘Data-tecture’

See, the internet really is a series of tubes! Photo by Simon Norfolk

This is only internet traffic related, but the NYT has posted an early preview of my story in this Sunday’s Magazine (an architecture special) on data centers, those increasingly large, occluded and vital info-factories that hold everything from our favorite YouTube videos to our Xbox Live Halo battles to our bank records to our Twitters to this very post.

There’s an excellent slideshow, from which the above image is taken, by Simon Norfolk.

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Posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 9:40 am by: Tom Vanderbilt
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Pitt Stop

The AP reports on what is definitely one of the stranger traffic-calming techniques I’ve come across:

A Russian newspaper reports that cardboard cutouts of Pitt dressed as a traffic cop have been placed by the most dangerous intersections in the city of Omsk.

It’s the latest move by authorities in their endless battle against speeding. Traffic accidents in Russia are among the highest in Europe.

The campaign seems to be working. Omsk officials say accidents are down as star-struck drivers ease off the gas to gaze at the unusual image.

I’m sure there’s a novelty effect at work. But maybe they can follow it up with Tom Cruise?

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Posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 4:57 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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