CONTACTTRAFFICABOUT TOM VANDERBILTOTHER WRITING CONTACT ABOUT THE BOOK

Archive for December 14th, 2009

Paralello-Parking: The Geometry of the Curb

If only Fermat had lived to the age of the automobile, he too might have grappled thusly:

How much extra length (above the length of your car) do you need to parallel park?

Maths (as they say in the U.K.) professor Simon Blackburn, working on behest of Vauxhall, has cracked the code (study can be downloaded at his page). Though much of it was beyond me — I suffer from horrible innumeracy — I was happy to learn about such things as “The Ackermann Linkage” (Ludlum-esque, that!). The footnotes also reveal that Blackburn is not the first to take a calculator to the curb — or kerb.

(Horn honk to Nathan)

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Posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 3:48 pm by: Tom Vanderbilt
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Twin Valves

A photo I took of a toilet at Stanford University — my research endeavors never cease! — is up at the Nudge blog. Comments point to the possible flaws in the system, as well as a seeming European ubiquity to these systems.

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Posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 3:35 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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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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