International Law

How We Drive

Image via Wikipedia

I have become a recent fan of Tom Vanderbilt's blog, How We Drive.  I thought the story Wired did on Tom was very revealing:

"Driving down a New Jersey highway three years ago, Tom Vanderbilt decided to stop being a goody-goody.

He fought the urge to merge at the first indication that his lane was ending and rode it right to the pinch point, wedging his way in front of a furious driver at the last second.

Racked with moral misgivings, he eventually looked into the science of merging and discovered salvation in high math, which proves he made the right choice -- and not just for his own time-saving benefit, but for humankind (or at least commuter-kind -- the seemingly selfish strategy keeps traffic moving faster for all).

"It doesn't have to be an ethics problem," Vanderbilt says. "It's really a system-optimization issue."

That's when he decided to write Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us). As part of his research, Vanderbilt set up Google Alerts to notify him about traffic-related news. "Half were about road traffic, and half were about Internet traffic," he says.

Unfortunately, drivers have a major disadvantage relative to data packets flowing across the Web: Humans think too much. Packets go where they're told rather than relying on the scraps of incomplete intelligence and "superstition," as Vanderbilt calls it, that humans use when choosing how to get from point A to point B."

Full post as published by Misleading Advertising Law on July 29, 2008 (boomark / email).