CONTACTTRAFFICABOUT TOM VANDERBILTOTHER WRITING CONTACT ABOUT THE BOOK

Archive for April 11th, 2010

Traffic Safety Film of the Week

VicRoads in Australia has been engendering all sorts of controversy for their “Don’t be a Dickhead” (yes, I’m serious) series of traffic safety adverts, as pictured above. There’s a lot of discussion in the article about which ads “work” better, which may be beside the point, as there’s scant evidence that road safety PSAs, no matter how clever or humorous or offensive or shocking, work at all (all those decades of bloody safety films for young drivers didn’t change the death rate — what has worked is controlling their exposure to driving and raising the driving age). Changing social mores is one important part of effecting road safety improvements, but whether PSAs can do this — in, say, the face of weak legal consequences — is another question.

And I had no idea “ginger” was pronounced with a hard ‘g’ down Australia way.

(thanks Richard)

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Posted on Sunday, April 11th, 2010 at 1:17 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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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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