Hilarious
Иногда рецензии на книги настолько замечательны, что саму книгу читать уже не надо. Вот пример. Это о книге Тома Вандербилта "Траффик". Автор рецензии считает, что альтернативным названием книги может стать "Идиоты". Те, кто за рулем, разумеется. Не мы, те, другие, которые вокруг нас.
Vanderbilt, who writes regularly about design and technology, cites a finding that 12.7 percent of the traffic slowdown after a crash has nothing to do with wreckage blocking lanes; it’s caused by gawkers. Rubberneckers attend to the spectacle so avidly that they themselves then get into accidents, slamming into the car in front of them when it brakes to get a better look or dig out a cellphone to take a picture. (This happens often enough for traffic types to have coined a word for it: “digi-necking.”) Exasperated highway professionals have actually tried erecting anti-rubbernecking screens around the scenes of accidents, but the vehicle toting the screen typically gets caught in the traffic jam it’s meant to prevent.
Moreover, Vanderbilt adds, “there is the interest in the screen itself.” Drivers will slow down to look at anything: “Something as simple as a couch dumped in a roadside ditch can send minor shudders of curiosity through the traffic flow.”
“It is not just that American households have more cars,” he writes, “it is that they are finding new places to take them.” They’re going someplace to eat. They’re driving to Whole Foods because they don’t like the produce at their neighborhood supermarket. They’re going out to get coffee. (So much of Starbucks’s revenue now comes from drive-through lanes that the company will put stores across the street from each other, sparing drivers “the agony of having to make a left turn during rush hour.”)
The most effective, least popular solution - aside from the currently effective, unpopular solution of $5-a-gallon gasoline - is congestion pricing: charging extra to use roads during rush hours.
My solution to the nation’s vehicular woes would be to make this good book required reading for anyone applying for a driver’s license. Though you could then be sure that some percentage of car crashes in America would be caused by people trying to skim “Traffic” while stuck in a bottleneck on their way to the D.M.V.
Vanderbilt, who writes regularly about design and technology, cites a finding that 12.7 percent of the traffic slowdown after a crash has nothing to do with wreckage blocking lanes; it’s caused by gawkers. Rubberneckers attend to the spectacle so avidly that they themselves then get into accidents, slamming into the car in front of them when it brakes to get a better look or dig out a cellphone to take a picture. (This happens often enough for traffic types to have coined a word for it: “digi-necking.”) Exasperated highway professionals have actually tried erecting anti-rubbernecking screens around the scenes of accidents, but the vehicle toting the screen typically gets caught in the traffic jam it’s meant to prevent.
Moreover, Vanderbilt adds, “there is the interest in the screen itself.” Drivers will slow down to look at anything: “Something as simple as a couch dumped in a roadside ditch can send minor shudders of curiosity through the traffic flow.”
“It is not just that American households have more cars,” he writes, “it is that they are finding new places to take them.” They’re going someplace to eat. They’re driving to Whole Foods because they don’t like the produce at their neighborhood supermarket. They’re going out to get coffee. (So much of Starbucks’s revenue now comes from drive-through lanes that the company will put stores across the street from each other, sparing drivers “the agony of having to make a left turn during rush hour.”)
The most effective, least popular solution - aside from the currently effective, unpopular solution of $5-a-gallon gasoline - is congestion pricing: charging extra to use roads during rush hours.
My solution to the nation’s vehicular woes would be to make this good book required reading for anyone applying for a driver’s license. Though you could then be sure that some percentage of car crashes in America would be caused by people trying to skim “Traffic” while stuck in a bottleneck on their way to the D.M.V.