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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, December 16, 2013 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Tom Vanderbilt

"Traffic; Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)"

ABSTRACT -- Why do traffic jams happen? How does the "windshield view" affect the way we see the world around us? Do people who merge at the last moment in construction work zones actually slow overall traffic?  What can actually be done to reduce traffic?  Bestselling author Tom Vanderbilt investigates these and other mysteries of the road, drawing from research in traffic engineering, psychology, behavioral economics and beyond to illuminate this surprisingly deep everyday activity.

SPEAKER -- Tom Vanderbilt writes for many publications, including Wired, Smithsonian, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Wilson Quarterly, among many others.  He is contributing editor to Outside magazine and a columnist for Slate.

His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller 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 territories, and by publishers in 18 other countries.  Writing in the Washington Post, book critic Jonathan Yardley said:  "Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic -- engagingly written, meticulously researched, endlessly interesting and informative -- is one of those rare books that comes out of the depths of nowhere... Traffic gets about as close to the heart of modern existence as any book could get, yet what's truly astonishing is that no one else has done it, at least not on the scale that Vanderbilt has achieved."

He has consulted for a variety of companies, from ad agencies to Fortune 500 corporations, and has given lectures at a variety of institutions around the world, from the Eero Saarinen Lecture at Yale University's School of Architecture to the Australasian Road Safety Conference in Canberra. He has also appeared on a wide variety of radio and television programs around the world, including NBC's Today Show, ABC News' Nightline, NPR's  Morning Edition, and Fresh Air with Teri Gross.

He is a Visiting Scholar at New York University's Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management, and has received fellowships from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visiting Arts, the Design Trust for Public Space, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture.


Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov