The Psychology of the Car explores automotive cultures through the lens of psychology with the goal of achieving a low-carbon transport future. Worldwide there are now more than one billion cars, and their number grows continuously. Yet there is growing evidence that humanity needs to reach 'peak cars' as increased air pollution, noise, accidents, and climate change support a decline in car usage. While many governments agree, the car remains attractive, and endeavors to change transport systems have faced fierce resistance. Based on insights from a wide range of transport behaviors, The Psychology of the Car shows the "why of automotive cultures, providing new perspectives essential for understanding its attractiveness and for defining a more desirable transport future. The Psychology of the Car illustrates the growth of global car use over time and its effect on urban transport systems and the global environment. It looks at the adoption of the car into lifestyles, the "mobilities turn, and how the car impacts collective and personal identities. The book examines car drivers themselves; their personalities, preferences, and personality disorders relevant to driving. The book looks at the role power, control, dominance, speed, and gender play, as well as the interrelationship between personal freedom and law enforcement. The book explores risk-taking behaviors as accidental death is a central element of car driving. The book addresses how interventions can be successful as well as which interventions are unlikely to work, and concludes with how a more sustainable transport future can be created based on emerging transport trends. - Features deep analyses of individual and collective psychologies of car affection, moving beyond sociology-based interpretations of automobile culture - Illustrates concepts using popular culture examples that expose ideas about automobility - Shows how fewer, smaller and more environmentally friendly cars, as well as low-carbon transport modes, are more socially attractive

Road accidents are the major cause of death and injury among young people in the developing world, and the field of psychology can offer great insights into the many factors that are at play when we get behind the wheels of our cars. Based on data collected around the world on drivers of all age groups, Graham Hole provides an up to date picture of the realities of driving, including visual perception issues, cell phone distractions, fatigue, drugs, and the effects of aging. These insights can help explain why we crash, as well as how we achieve the amazing feat of not crashing more often than we do. In this jargon-free and very accessible book, Hole applies psychological methods and insights to this every-day experience with two audiences in mind. First, he speaks to accident investigators, who frequently rely on well-developed understandings of engineering and forensics and less insight into the psychology of the driver. Second, of course, this book will be of value to anyone interested in the application of cognitive psychology to real-world behaviors, and to anyone who drives.

These imaginative thought experiments are the inventions of one of the world's eminent brain researchers. These imaginative thought experiments are the inventions of one of the world's eminent brain researchers. They are "vehicles," a series of hypothetical, self-operating machines that exhibit increasingly intricate if not always successful or civilized "behavior." Each of the vehicles in the series incorporates the essential features of all the earlier models and along the way they come to embody aggression, love, logic, manifestations of foresight, concept formation, creative thinking, personality, and free will. In a section of extensive biological notes, Braitenberg locates many elements of his fantasy in current brain research.

The inside story of the groundbreaking experiment that captured what people think about the life-and-death dilemmas posed by driverless cars. Human drivers don't find themselves facing such moral dilemmas as "should I sacrifice myself by driving off a cliff if that could save the life of a little girl on the road?" Human brains aren't fast enough to make that kind of calculation; the car is over the cliff in a nanosecond. A self-driving car, on the other hand, can compute fast enough to make such a decision--to do whatever humans have programmed it to do. But what should that be? This book investigates how people want driverless cars to decide matters of life and death. In The Car That Knew Too Much, psychologist Jean-François Bonnefon reports on a groundbreaking experiment that captured what people think cars should do in situations where not everyone can be saved. Sacrifice the passengers for pedestrians? Save children rather than adults? Kill one person so many can live? Bonnefon and his collaborators Iyad Rahwan and Azim Shariff designed the largest experiment in moral psychology ever: the Moral Machine, an interactive website that has allowed people --eventually, millions of them, from 233 countries and territories--to make choices within detailed accident scenarios. Bonnefon discusses the responses (reporting, among other things, that babies, children, and pregnant women were most likely to be saved), the media frenzy over news of the experiment, and scholarly responses to it. Boosters for driverless cars argue that they will be in fewer accidents than human-driven cars. It's up to humans to decide how many fatal accidents we will allow these cars to have.

Driving is a fact of life. We are all spending more and more time on the road, and traffic is an issue we face everyday. This book will make you think about it in a whole new light. We have always had a passion for cars and driving. Now Traffic offers us an exceptionally rich understanding of that passion. Vanderbilt explains why traffic jams form, outlines the unintended consequences of our attempts to engineer safety and even identifies the most common mistakes drivers make in parking lots. Based on exhaustive research and interviews with driving experts and traffic officials around the globe, Traffic gets under the hood of the quotidian activity of driving to uncover the surprisingly complex web of physical, psychological and technical factors that explain how traffic works.

The Handbook of Traffic Psychology covers all key areas of research in this field including theory, applications, methodology and analyses, variables that affect traffic, driver problem behaviors, and countermeasures to reduce risk on roadways. Comprehensive in scope, the methodology section includes case-control studies, self-report instruments and methods, field methods and naturalistic observational techniques, instrumented vehicles and in-car recording techniques, modeling and simulation methods, in vivo methods, clinical assessment, and crash datasets and analyses. Experienced researchers will better understand what methods are most useful for what kinds of studies and students can better understand the myriad of techniques used in this discipline. - Focuses specifically on traffic, as opposed to transport - Covers all key areas of research in traffic psychology including theory, applications, methodology and analyses, variables that affect traffic, driver problem behaviors, and countermeasures to reduce the risk of variables and behavior - Contents include how to conduct traffic research and how to analyze data - Contributors come from more than 10 countries, including US, UK, Japan, Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland, Mexico, Australia, Canada, Turkey, France, Finland, Norway, Israel, and South Africa

A new way forward for sustainable quality of life in cities of all sizes Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity is a book of forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to present a new vision of urban development in the United States. Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he co-founded, Charles Marohn explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem. Inside, you’ll learn why inducing growth and development has been the conventional response to urban financial struggles—and why it just doesn’t work. New development and high-risk investing don’t generate enough wealth to support itself, and cities continue to struggle. Read this book to find out how cities large and small can focus on bottom-up investments to minimize risk and maximize their ability to strengthen the community financially and improve citizens’ quality of life. Develop in-depth knowledge of the underlying logic behind the “traditional” search for never-ending urban growth Learn practical solutions for ameliorating financial struggles through low-risk investment and a grassroots focus Gain insights and tools that can stop the vicious cycle of budget shortfalls and unexpected downturns Become a part of the Strong Towns revolution by shifting the focus away from top-down growth toward rebuilding American prosperity Strong Towns acknowledges that there is a problem with the American approach to growth and shows community leaders a new way forward. The Strong Towns response is a revolution in how we assemble the places we live.