Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt Read Free Book Online Page B

number of intersections without traffic lights. Who will go, who will yield—it is an intricate social ballet with rough, vague guidelines. “There is no order, it’s whoever arrives first,” according to Agustín Barrios Gómez, an entrepreneur and sometime politico, as he drove in the Polanco neighborhood in his battered Nissan Tsuru, a car that seemed a bit beneath his station. “Mexican criminals are very car-conscious and watch-conscious,” he explained. “In Monterrey I wear a Rolex; here I wear a Swatch.” At each crossing, he slowed briefly to assess what the driver coming from the left or right might be doing. The problem was that cars often seemed to be arriving at the same time. In one of these instances, he barreled through, forcing a BMW to stop. “I did not make eye contact,” he said firmly, after clearing the intersection.
    Eye contact is a critical factor at unmarked intersections in Mexico City. Look at another driver and he will know that you have seen him, and thus dart ahead of you.
Not
looking at a driver shifts the burden of responsibility to him (assuming he has actually seen you), which allows you to proceed first—if, that is, he truly believes you are not aware of him. There’s always the chance that both drivers are not actually looking. In the case of Barrios Gómez, the perceived social cost of stopping might have been greater for the BMW, higher as it is in the social hierarchy than an old Nissan Tsuru; then again, the BMW had more to lose in terms of sheer car value by not stopping. Drivers not wanting to cooperate, unwilling to begin that relationship of “reciprocal altruism,” simply do not look, or they pretend not to look—the dreaded “stare-ahead.” It is the same with the many beggars found at intersections in Mexico City. It is easier not to give if one does not make eye contact, which is why one sees, as in other cities, so many drivers looking rigidly ahead as they wait for the light.
             
    Your daily drive may not seem to have much to do with the strategies of the Cold War, but every time two cars approach an unmarked intersection simultaneously, or four cars sidle up to a four-way stop at about the same time, a form of game theory is being applied. Game theory, as defined by the Nobel Prize–winning economist Thomas Schelling, is the process of strategic decision making that occurs when, as in a nuclear standoff or a stop-sign showdown, “two or more individuals have choices to make, preferences regarding the outcomes, and some knowledge of the choices available to each other and of each other’s preferences. The outcome depends on the choices that both of them make, or all of them if there are more than two.”
    Traffic is filled with these daily moments of impromptu decision making and brinksmanship. As Schelling has argued, one of the most effective, albeit risky, strategies in game theory involves the use of an “asymmetry in communication.” One driver, like Barrios Gómez in Mexico City, makes himself “unavailable” to receive messages, and thus cannot be swayed from going first through the intersection. These sorts of tactics can be quite effective, if you feel like risking your neck to prove a bit of Cold War strategy. Pedestrians, for example, are told that making eye contact is essential to crossing the street at a marked crosswalk (the kind without traffic lights), but at least one study has shown that drivers were more likely to let pedestrians cross when they did
not
look at the oncoming car.
    Drivers at intersections are acting from a complicated set of motives and assumptions that may or may not have anything to do with traffic law. In one study, researchers showed subjects a series of photographs of an intersection toward which two vehicles, equally distant from the intersection, were traveling. One had the legal right-of-way, and the other did not; the second driver also did not know if the first driver would take the