CONTACTTRAFFICABOUT TOM VANDERBILTOTHER WRITING CONTACT ABOUT THE BOOK

Archive for March 15th, 2010

Road Swill

Warning: Pub crawl ahead.

Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day: Drunken pedestrian warning signs.

Alan of the Melbourne Urbanist sends along this link to the original Daily Telegraph dispatch; the sign is in Romania, but was apparently inspired by an unnamed town in Germany.

Interesting idea, though one wonders if the sign distracts drivers from the actual presence of sloshed revelers in the road; it also presume sobriety and attention on the part of the drivers themselves. “We must warn drivers that sometimes people who have little control over their actions can suddenly appear in the road,” the town’s mayor said. It’s just as appropriate to change the word ‘drivers’ to ‘pedestrians,’ to my mind.

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [MySpace] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Yahoo!]
Posted on Monday, March 15th, 2010 at 11:01 am by: Tom Vanderbilt
2 Comments. Click here to leave a comment.

No Character

I couldn’t help but see the ridiculousness in this caption from a local paper:

A plan to build on this parking lot, which neighbors said would destroy the character of Carroll Gardens, is off.

I’m glad they backed off trying to do a full build-out — but now how about amending the zoning to ban the construction of parking lots on Carroll Garden’s historical courtyards?

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [MySpace] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Yahoo!]
Posted on Monday, March 15th, 2010 at 8:34 am by: Tom Vanderbilt
1 Comment. Click here to leave a comment.

When the Highway Becomes a Runway

My latest Slate column examines this rare, but not as rare as you might think, phenomenon.

There are no hard numbers on annual occurrences of airplane landings on highways or streets, but a troll through the Federal Aviation Administration’s incident database shows that there tend to be more than a dozen such events in any given year (that the FAA knows about, at least). The events range in nature and geography. Mechanical difficulty ranks prominently in the causative universe. But pilots running out of fuel (”fuel starvation,” as investigators put it), whether owing to unforeseen flight complications or actual negligence, is common, too. One FAA report dryly refers to a plane that “landed on a public street to discharge a passenger.” And emergency landings can take place on deserted country roads, residential neighborhoods, or bustling thoroughfares. As the FAA’s Les Dorr, after looking through the database himself, put it to me in an e-mail: “Highway landings are rather more frequent than I would have thought.”

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [MySpace] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Yahoo!]
Posted on Monday, March 15th, 2010 at 8:12 am by: Tom Vanderbilt
4 Comments. Click here to leave a comment.
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

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [MySpace] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Yahoo!]
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.

Upcoming Talks

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [MySpace] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Yahoo!]
Twitter
March 2010
M T W T F S S
« Feb   Apr »
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031