Apparently the price of anarchy post was fairly popular, and I was recently invited to give a guest post on the traffic blog http://ecostreets.net.

Three reasons we don’t understand traffic

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2023-01-27 21:30:09

Apparently the price of anarchy post was fairly popular, and I was recently invited to give a guest post on the traffic blog http://ecostreets.net. So I did. Please go check it out: http://studentdev.jour.unr.edu/ecostreets/?p=653. The topic is “three reasons we don’t understand traffic”.

Being stuck in traffic is frustrating in a way that few other things are. Something about the helplessness of it makes us extremely irritable, and we become inclined to think that the people around us are idiots. The guy who just cut you off, the lady talking on her cell phone with her blinker left on, the construction workers standing around and looking at a hole in the ground instead of actually fixing the road. Everyone seems incompetent and unintelligent when you’re stuck in traffic.

Not uncommonly, this line of thinking extends to the people that decided how and where to build the roads. Their (lack of) planning can seem like pure idiocy, and the solution for fixing the terrible gridlock can seem painfully obvious.