A couple of physicists and a computer modeller have studied abstract models of traffic congestion in real world situations to measure the cost of selfish driving behaviour. I have banged on about the myth of the ‘open road’ for a while now. In my TV interview on the Sunday show I located the problem of ‘hoons’ (media label for people, mostly young men, who partake in spectacular subcultural practices and rituals) with the moment of selfishness where drivers understand the road not as a shared resource but as a personal resource determined by their own journey. There is an ideological play here, the myth of the ‘open road’ is congruent with liberal (non)humanist conceptions of individual freedom. It is ‘(non)humanist’ because the freedom of the road is only enjoyed by properly cybernetic road users of ‘driver+vehicle’.
One problem that the physicists can’t account for in their traffic models involves the flow of information within a journey. Taking a certain path (a path that allegedly exists prior to the individual event of the journey) is understood as being either ‘selfish’ or not. Traffic is a dynamic event however, it is not the product of predetermined variables, but how these variables change over time including when drivers are actually on the road. Most drivers do no know if there is a traffic jam, and if there is heavy congestion, then they normally accept this as a necessary problem of certain roads. It will not be until every car can communicate with every other car through real time telemetry system combined with sat nav systems to help drivers reconfigure journeys to incorporate emergent traffic congestion events, that they will be able to have enough information to avoid traffic congestion. This will still be self-interested behaviour though…