Traffic

by Tom Vanderbilt

Popularized by the Nobel mathematician John Nash, it describes a state in which no one player of an experimental game can make himself better off by his own action alone.

you cannot improve your situation, why move to a different road? The irony is that when everyone does what is best for him- or herself, they’re not doing what is best for everyone.

Disney executives are as much in the traffic business as the entertainment business: moving people around, from ride to ride (and through the shops and restaurants), in the most efficient manner and with the least customer grumbling. They hire talented engineers, like Bruce Laval, to manage these flows and queues.

The desire to “catch” a green makes drivers speed up at precisely the moment they should be looking for vehicles making oncoming turns or entering the main road from a right turn on red.

“When the engineers build something,” Granda says, “the question everybody should ask is, What effect will it have on the driver? How will the driver react, not only today, but after the driver sees that sign or lane marking over a period of time? Will they adapt to it?”

The answer lies in the number of vehicles in each country. In 1951, there were about 60,000 motor vehicles in China, while in the United States, there were roughly 49 million. By 1999, when China had 50 million vehicles, the United States had over 200 million—four times as many. And yet twice as many people were killed on Chinese roads than American ones. How could the country with so many fewer vehicles have so many more deaths?

What Smeed’s law showed was that, across a number of countries, ranging from the United States to New Zealand, the number of people killed on the roads tended to rise as the number of cars on the road began to rise—up to a point—and then, gradually if not totally uniformly, the fatality rates began to drop, as, generally, did the absolute numbers of fatalities.

The vexing, intertwined nature of this dilemma is reflected in a piece of Hindi slang I learned while in Delhi: jugad. The word has a shifting palette of meanings, mostly arrayed around the central idea of “creative improvisation.

American psychologist and risk-analysis expert Paul

Slovic has shown, people are more likely to give more money to charity campaigns that feature one child rather than those that show multiple children—even when the appeal features only one more child.

Ask someone what their commute is, and they will inevitably give an answer in minutes, as if they were driving across a clock face.

We think cars are the risk when on foot; we think pedestrians act dangerously when we’re behind the wheel. We want safer cars so we can drive more dangerously.

“As time goes on the technical problems become more automatic, while the people problems become more surrealistic.”