Door to Door Quotes

“during a hearing on the proposed expansion of a port terminal, a member of the public objected on the grounds that the project would generate more truck trips on already crowded freeways.
"Why do I need a port? the woman asked. "I have Walmart."
There were murmurs of agreement from an audience who felt that these trucks were indeed deplorable, their presence a barrier on the travels and commerce of "real people.”
― Edward Humes, Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation

“When police arrested a New York bus driver for running down a schoolgirl in a crosswalk… the New York Daily News decried what it saw as mistreatment of one of the city’s bus drivers. The head of the transit union protested this enforcement of the city’s new Right of Way Law as “outrageous, illogical and anti-worker” while branding the head of a city street safety advocacy group “a progressive intellectual jackass.” The same union previously launched a work slowdown when another bus driver faced sanctions for killing a seventy-eight-year-old woman in a crosswalk in December 2014. All this occurred because police sought to enforce _misdemeanor_ charges in cases of pedestrians who were run over in crosswalks where they had the clear right of way.”
― Edward Humes, Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation

“What the brain is really good at is toggling between mind-absorbing tasks—shifting focus rather than dividing it, then picking up where it left off when it toggles back. So when drivers are messing with cell phones or car stereos or dropped baby bottles, they are not driving. They have toggled, shifting focus and attention from one task to another, sometimes quite rapidly, but never simultaneously. This is the essence of distraction and it’s not limited to staring down at a phone instead of out through the windshield. Brain scans of drivers talking on the phone while staring straight ahead show that activity in the area of the brain that processes moving images decreases by one third or more—hard evidence of a distracted brain. There have been many fatal crashes attributed to this “inattention blindness,” commonly called “tunnel vision.” Drivers talking on cell phones or performing other non-driving tasks can become so focused on the non-driving activity that their brains fail to perceive half the information their eyeballs are receiving from the driving environment. They can appear to be paying attention—the drivers may even think they are paying attention—but they are distracted drivers. This is not a matter of skill or practice or experience. It’s biology. The”
― Edward Humes, Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation – A Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist Reveals Hidden Truths About Commuting and the Mobility Revolution