Tom Vanderbilt > Quotes

“The way humans hunt for parking and the way animals hunt for food are not as different as you might think.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

“Men may or may not be better drivers than women, but they seem to die more often trying to prove that they are.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

“Human attention, in the best of circumstances, is a fluid but fragile entity. Beyond a certain threshold, the more that is asked of it, the less well it performs. When this happens in a psychological experiment, it is interesting. When it happens in traffic, it can be fatal.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

“It's probably no accident that whenever one hears of a smart technology, it refers to something that has been taken out of human control.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

“As Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert argues, 'You can't adapt to commuting, because it's entirely unpredictable. Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day.'”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

“When a situation feels dangerous to you, it's probably more safe than you know; when a situation feels safe, that is precisely when you should feel on guard.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

“There is a simple mantra you can carry about you in traffic: When a situation feels dangerous to you, it's probably more safe than you know; when a situation feels safe, that is precisely when you should feel on guard. Most crashes, after all, happen on dry roads, on clear, sunny days, to sober drivers.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

“In English-language speech, we spend five times as much time producing vowels as consonants. In singing, that ratio can hit two hundred to one.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

“The pursuit of a kind of absolute safety, above all other considerations of what makes places good environments, has not only made those streets and cities less attractive, it has, in many cases, made them less safe.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic

“This raises the interesting, if seemingly outlandish, question of why car drivers, virtually alone among users of wheeled transport, do not wear helmets. Yes, cars do provide a nice metal cocoon with inflatable cushions. But in Australia, for example, head injuries among car occupants, according to research by the Federal Office of Road Safety, make up half the country’s traffic-injury costs. Helmets, cheaper and more reliable than side-impact air bags, would reduce injuries and cut fatalities by some 25 percent.95 A crazy idea, perhaps, but so were air bags once.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic

“This is the reason the whole ‘keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel, use the hands-free handset’ idea is a silly thing,” Simons said. “Having your eyes on the road doesn’t do any good unless your attention is on the road too.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic

“Everything must be for something. I tell someone I'm going on an eighty-mile bike ride, and they ask, "What are you training for?" I want to answer, "I don't know... life?" "What is admired is success, achievement, the quality of performance," write the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, "rather than the quality of experience."

But what if we don't want to become virtuoso musicians or renowned artists? What if we only want to dabble in these things, to see if they might subtly change our outlook on the world or even, as we try to learn them, change us? What if we just want to enjoy them?

The idea of undertaking new pursuits, ones that you may never be very good at, seems perverse in this age of single-minded peak performance.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

“That word, which has an almost entirely pejorative meaning today as a hopelessly superficial dabbler, is derived from the Italian dilettare, which means “to delight.” As the art historian Bruce Redford notes, “dilettante”—one who exhibits delight—entered English with the formation of the Society of Dilettanti, an eighteenth-century group of Englishmen who had returned from the grand tour brimming with enthusiasm for Continental art and culture. As the process of acquiring knowledge gradually became more specialized, Redford notes, the meaning of the word shifted. By the time George Eliot wrote Middlemarch in the early 1870s, the word had become an insult.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

“'Can you imagine, 30 years ago, saying nobody will make coffee at home?' Nancy McGuckin, a travel researcher in Washington, D.C.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

“The road, more than simply a system of regulations and designs, is a place where many millions of us, with only loose parameters for how to behave, are thrown together daily in a kind of massive petri dish in which all kinds of uncharted, little-understood dynamics are at work. There is no other place where so many people from different walks of life--different ages, races, classes, religions, genders, political preferences, lifestyle choices, levels of psychological stability--mingle so freely.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

“We all have wanted, at one time or another, to appear as an idealized self. "I'm actually a quite different person," as the playwright Ödön von Horváth wrote, "I just never get around to being him.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“The relative ease of most driving lures us into thinking we can get away with doing other things. Indeed, those other things, like listening to the radio, can help when driving itself is threatening to cause fatigue. But we buy into the myth of multitasking with little actual knowledge of how much we can really add in or, as with the television news, how much we are missing. As the inner life of the driver begins to come into focus, it is becoming clear not only that distraction is the single biggest problem on the road but that we have little concept of just how distracted we are.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic

“What is admired is success, achievement, the quality of performance,” writes the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “rather than the quality of experience.” But what if we don’t want to become virtuoso musicians or renowned artists? What if we only want to dabble in these things, to see if they might subtly change our outlook on the world or even, as we try to learn them, change us? What if we just want to enjoy them?”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

“As you plunge into learning some art or skill, the world around you appears new and bursting with infinite horizons. Each day brims with new discoveries as you take your tentative first steps, slowly pushing the bounds of exploration. You make mistakes, but even these are empowering, because they are mistakes you have never made before.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

“Children, in a very real sense, have beginners’ minds, open to wider possibilities. They see the world with fresher eyes, are less burdened with preconception and past experience, and are less guided by what they know to be true. They are more likely to pick up details that adults might discard as irrelevant. Because they’re less concerned with being wrong or looking foolish, children often ask questions that adults won’t ask.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

“Let me let you in on a little secret,” he writes. “If you are hearing about something old, it is almost certainly good. Why? Because nobody wants to talk about shitty old stuff, but lots of people still talk about shitty new stuff, because they are still trying to figure out if it is shitty or not. The past wasn’t better, we just forgot about all the shitty shit.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“If obedience to fashion consists in imitation of an example, conscious neglect of fashion represents similar imitation, but under an inverse sign.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“steep learning curve means you’re climbing faster. And the steepest learning curves come right away.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

“A gulf was opening. Unless you were a professional, you were a mere dilettante or an "amateur." And what did this loaded word originally signify? "To love," derived from the French aimer. With the increasing specialization of knowledge and professionalization of everyday life, suddenly being delighted by something, or loving something, was seen as vaguely disreputable.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

“The psychologist Robert Zajonc argued that the way we feel about something, rather than coming on the heels of cognition—that is, “before I can like something, I must have some knowledge about it”—actually accompanies and may even precede it.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“We all want to be individuals on the road, but smooth-flowing traffic requires conformity. We want all the lights to be green, unless we are on the intersecting road, in which case we want those lights to be green. We want little traffic on our own street but a convenient ten-lane highway blazing just nearby. We all wish the other person would not drive, so that our trip would be faster. What’s best for us on the road is often not best for everyone else, and vice versa.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic

“Knowing where to look—and remembering what you have seen—is a hallmark of experience and expertise.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,” writes Shunryu Suzuki. “In the expert’s mind there are few.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

“Art experts are said to have a “good eye.” What they really have is a good brain. It is less that they spot things that others do not; it is that they know where to look;”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“Intersections are crash magnets.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us