Traffic

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Traffic has filled the world. From livable, coastal Trondheim, Norway, to gridlocked Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia. From the narrow streets of Boston to the bottlenecked “beltways” that surround US cities. Even to the desolate Transamazon Highway in Brazil. Traffic volumes increased at first imperceptibly, then rapidly as traffic planners and highway builders commanded great budgets and imagined they could manage the flood. Instead they created the clogged roads and highways of the 21st century. So accustomed were town fathers and mothers, city planners, and traffic engineers to accommodating the automobile, they belatedly embraced traffic control as a solution to city safety problems, including noise, pollution, and pedestrian injuries and fatalities, and they ignored such inexpensive solutions as the bicycle. Paul Josephson's Traffic considers the history of traffic, and the political and other controversies that frame the belated technological efforts to calm it.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.