Traffic

by Paul Josephson, Ian Bogost (Editor), Christopher Schaberg (Editor)

Overview

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

Speed. Bump. Speed. Traffic considers the history and philosophy of roundabouts, speed bumps, the pedestrian mall, and other efforts to manage traffic. Exploring ways to reign in the power of the internal combustion engine, ramp back century-long efforts to increase the flows of traffic, and establish greater balance between humans and machines, Paul Josephson 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501329333
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	03/09/2017
Series:	Object Lessons
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	4.70(w) x 6.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Paul Josephson is Professor of History at Colby College, USA. He is the author of twelve books, including Fish Sticks, Sports Bras, and Aluminum Cans (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), The Conquest of the Russian Arctic (Harvard University Press, 2014), Lenin's Laureate: A Life in Communist Science (MIT Press, 2010), Would Trotsky Wear a Bluetooth? Technological Utopianism Under Socialism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), and Motorized Obsession: Life, Liberty and the Small Bore Engine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Director of Film & Media Studies, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. Bogost is author or co-author of ten books, including Alien Phenomenology (2012)and Play Anything (2016).

Christopher Schaberg is Director of the Program in Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and the author of The Textual Life of Airports (2012), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness (2017), The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018), Searching for the Anthropocene (2019), Pedagogy of the Depressed (2021), and Adventure: An Argument for Limits (2023), all published by Bloomsbury. He is also the founding co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons book series.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Mushrooms in Minsk
2. Speed Bumps in Twentieth Century Philosophy
3. Utopian Visions of Machines and People: A World Without Speed Bumps
4. Mumford and Moses
5. The Historical Concatenation of Congestion
6. Speed Bumpology
7. Crashworthy Automobiles as Speed Bumps
8. Race, Equality and Traffic
9. Pedestrian Malls as Large Scale Speed Bumps
10. The Woonerf: The Neighborhood Speed Bump
11. Taming Roads Themselves
12. Curb Cuts for People, Roundabouts for Automobiles
13. The Bicycle as a Neo-Luddite Traffic Solution
14. Gendered Speed Bumps
15. If Stopped in Traffic, Hope for a Crashworthy Automobile
16. Safety Delays in the Name of Freedom
17. Speed Bump Downsides
18. Waxing and Waning of Brazilian Speed Bumps
19. Potholes and Paper Money
20. Speed Bumps for Other Hopeful Technologies
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Traffic is both insightful and entertaining. Based on a range of sources, it provides us with a fuller understanding of the methods by which we might be able to control the negative effects of the automobile on our cities.” —Joel A. Tarr, Richard S. Caliguiri University Professor of History and Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

“Paul Josephson, with deft humor and brilliance, shines a spotlight on one of the simplest and most unassuming cures for our traffic ills-the speed bump. That invention is not the new, new thing, like Uber, autonomous vehicles, and paying for transit with your smart phone. The speed bump is tried and true, and represents much more than a lump of pavement. Its very idea is the way we must design the cities of the future for people and not just automobiles.” —Lois DeMeester, CEO and Founder of Mobility Lab

“These Object Lessons books are interesting little in-depth examinations and philosophical treatises on objects as disparate as cigarette lighters, hotels, questionnaires, eggs, drones, golf balls, shipping containers, and waste. Like many of the other authors in the series, Paul Josephson, through humor and intelligence, offers great insight. He makes reading about traffic much more pleasant than being stuck in it.” —Lit Hub

From the Publisher