Road safety research has traditionally involved a focus on individuals in which social norms are considered but rarely discussed in detail. Outlining the existing body of research on young drivers in particular, In the Company of Cars shows the contribution that considering road safety from a social and cultural perspective could make to the reduction of death and injury on the roads. It highlights the involvement of driving cultures, as distinct from car cultures, in the social framing of cars and the ways in which they are utilised.

An award-winning author has created his most expansive work to date–a captivating family epic, a novel that moves effortlessly from past to present on its journey to the truth of how we grow out of, away from, and into our parents. “Are we there yet?” It’s the time-honored question of kids on a long family car trip–and Emil Czabek’s children are no exception. Yet Em asks himself the same thing as the family travels to celebrate his parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, and he wonders if he has escaped their wonderfully bad example. The midwestern drive is Em’s occasion to recall the Czabek clan’s amazing odyssey, one that sprawls through the second half of the twentieth century. It begins with his parents’ wedding on the TV show It’s Your Marriage, and careens from a suburban house built sideways by a drunken contractor to a farm meant to shelter the Czabeks from a country coming apart. It is the story of Em’s father, Wally–diligent, distant, hard-drinking–and his attempts to please, protect, or simply placate his nervous, restless, and sensual wife, Susan, all in plain sight of the children they can’t seem to stop having. As the tumultuous decades merge in his mind like the cars on the highway, Em must decide whether he should take away his parents’ autonomy and place them in the Heartland Home for the Elders. Beside him, his wife, Dorie, a woman who has run both a triathlon and for public office, makes him question what he’s inherited and whether he himself has become the responsible spouse of a drifting partner–especially since she’s packing a diaphragm and he’s had a vasectomy. Wildly comic and wrenchingly poignant, The Company Car is a special achievement, a book that drives through territory John Irving and Jonathan Franzen have made popular to arrive at a stunning destination all its own.

Transportation research has traditionally been dominated by engineering and logistics research approaches. This book integrates social, economic, and behavioral sciences into the transportation field. As its title indicates, emphasis is on socioeconomic changes, which increasingly govern the development of the transportation sector. The papers presented here originated at a conference on Social Change and Sustainable Transport held at the University of California at Berkeley in March 1999, under the auspices of the European Science Foundation and the National Science Foundation. The contributors, who represent a range of disciplines, including geography and regional science, economics, political science, sociology, and psychology, come from twelve different countries. Their subjects cover the consequences of environmentally sustainable transportation vs. the "business-as-usual" status quo, the new phenomenon of "edge cities," automobile dependence as a social problem, the influence of leisure or discretionary travel and of company cars, the problems of freight transport, the future of railroads in Europe, the imposition of electronic road tolls, potential transport benefits of e-commerce, and the electric car.