Bookmarks Jan/Feb - Page 2


Every year, 40,000 Americans are killed on the road; more die driving in one month than were killed at the World Trade Center on September 11. Fol­lowing those attacks, many people decided not to fly, so they drove instead. In consequence, as Vanderbilt reports, road "deaths in the three months after 9/11 were 9 percent higher than those during similar periods two years before." In a sad, unintended way, terrorism and traffic deaths became inextricably linked.

This book is the first comprehensive popular account of driving and traffic psychology. In it, Vanderbilt has made accessible an enormous amount of material: its 300 pages, including 100 pages of footnotes, summarize research I'll bet you didn't even know existed. The book brims with head-spinning facts, studies, and statistics, and delivers choice anecdotes. Reading it is a little like driving itself: it's so packed, so congested with codified data, that reading it can be downright fatiguing. Nodding off occasionally, you want to pull over and take a little nap, or pour yourself a big slug of coffee.

Intriguingly enough, the book echoes themes that have emerged in psychotherapy. After I'd read this book, the word that persisted in my mind—one that seems an implicit subtheme of the book—was mindfulness, a term so widely adopted in psychotherapy as to be almost banal. Much of the psychology of driving is, in effect, about "mindfulness," how we pay attention. Strangely, the point that paying attention is the most critical requirement for driving sets up the paradox alluded to earlier: the most seemingly dangerous roads can actually be the safest, and the ones designed to be the safest can be the most dangerous.

How can this be? Here's where the minute attention to attention itself pays off in the research. Ask yourself how much time you're allowed to be distracted, while behind the wheel, before something terrible happens? The answer: two seconds. Being generous, add another second. Two to three seconds.

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