Code for the Road

April 1, 2025

highway (hī´ wā) n: a laboratory of cooperative prediction

Spend a day on a busy Interstate highway in the U.S. Be amazed. People who do not know each other crowd together into narrow lanes, steering lethal machines at great speed past each other, separated by a few dozen centimeters.

They do not discuss their maneuvers together beforehand. Each machine operator decides autonomously what to do during each close encounter. No one tells anyone what to do.

Instead, everyone involved has to predict what everyone else will do.

Someone's book that I read recently described driving a motor vehicle in traffic as predictive cooperation. It might have been Malcom Gladwell, in Talking to Strangers.

The goal shared by all drivers is to obtain a cooperative result, because nobody dies then. When they cannot negotiate, nor even communicate, drivers must resort to predicting each others' behavior in order to inform their own cooperative actions.

This is where Road Code comes into play. I mean something beyond the obvious traffic laws and general skills that get tested during the Divers' License exam. Road Code is an inexpressible quality that makes a person more predictable.

Recently we found ourselves on an Interstate highway heavily used by long-haul trucks. Now, in the past on this route we would go the posted speed limit. We would pass a lot of slightly slower trucks. Often we found ourselves speeding up even more, perhaps to keep pace with a peloton of other cars pushing along, nose-to-tail in the left lane. It was stressful. It made us dislike that highway.

This time we tried a new Road Code: go just a little bit slower than the limit, a constant speed still fast enough for the flow of traffic. Suddenly it felt that the whole road relaxed. Now and then, a truck going a mile or two faster would pass us. Traffic never piled up behind us, either, as everyone overtaking us had plenty of time to observe and predict our pace.

Now and then we would come upon some vehicle going a lot slower. But it was easy to pass without speeding up. All in all, we drove a few more minutes and reached our destination with less fatigue and better memories of the scenery compared to previous trips on that road.

The gas mileage improved, too!

Predictability seems to benefit all concerned during cooperation. Alas, someone behaving uncooperatively can exploit it. What to do then?

The choices appear at first to be: either become unpredictable or become uncooperative. In old age I consider a third choice: distance. Send that person away on down the road as fast as they will go. The scenery will get better again after they depart from it.