when traffic lights make us stop and think

speaking of manhole covers, I heard this NPR story on the way home from Thanksgiving in the mountains: When Traffic Lights Make Us Stop and Think.

The story was a plug for Brian Hayes, whose new book, Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape, I must get my hands on. Hayes is a, as far as I can tell, nosy amateur, who, stumped by his young daughter's questions about the world around them, decided to investigate. Most of the questions seemed to center around industrial infrastructure, hence the book.

Although I was annoyed by the hokey-jokey tone of the interviewer, who seemed to find curiosity about things inappropriate (curiosity about what people do in the privacy of their cars was another matter), I got to hear a lot of nifty things about: the fact that there are ventilation vents everywhere for all the underground tunnels; the stoplight control boxes; the fact that the crosswalk buttons are connected to something, and you only need to push them once; really nifty lane markers made of plastic, with glass beads embedded into them, etc.

There was also a segment where they went into a traffic control room. There was a wall of 36 (or some number with "6" in it) monitors, watched by a guy I hope to God was actually named Terrain Wiggins, although I doubt it:

VOICE OVER: Each monitor shows a different intersection, but the scenery is the same: traffic.

INTERVIEWER: Is it kinda like watching the paint dry?

MONITOR GUY: No, actually it's not. It's pretty interesting. I can see incidents as they happen. It's like catching lightning in a bottle actually seeing a traffic accident as it occurs.

INTERVIEWER: You ever see anything that maybe you figure you shouldn't be seeing?

MONITOR GUY: Nothing like that, no, we're not allowed to zoom in or anything like that.

You see what I mean about the annoying interviewer. I guess even traffic lights didn't make him stop and think.

Anyhoo, go to the site and give it a listen. And maybe buy the book and give it a read and then send it to me! The site also has Hayes' photos of manhole covers around the country and the world (see the one above, from New Orleans), and a Flickr group with mostly Hayes' photos of the "industriosphere."