Traffic lights: the perfect analogy for government

Slow, inefficient, costly, frustrating, and lethal

Traffic lights are a Pavlovian bell, an exercise conditioning blind obedience to perceived “authority.” They represent a gamification of submission, whereby matching your behavior to basic colors grants you a sense of accomplishment - just like a childish video game. Traffic lights reward you with a feeling of satisfaction as you discover and adhere to simple patterns, and thus condition you to treat subversiveness as a source of pride and joy, or even worse, a virtue.

“I’m such a good law-abiding citizen,” you think to yourself as you religiously adhere to the holy red light, even at an empty intersection, when no other vehicles or pedestrians approach from any direction. Conversely, you get a sense of guilt, shame or fear when you run a red light after just having missed the yellow, even when no one is there to witness your grave sin.

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The unforgivable traffic light

Traffic lights are mind-rotting and undignified. Mindlessly obeying them means that you bestow authority over you to mere lights that arbitrarily turn on and off, regardless of necessity of function. I wonder what that awareness does to your subconscious self-regard.

Traffic lights are inefficient and dangerous. Traffic light intersections are much slower than roundabouts, plus they cause more fatal accidents. What ever happened to the “If it saved one life…?” appeal to emotion? Let us not mention the unnecessary cost of maintaining traffic lights, or their uselessness when the power cuts out.

Traffic lights are a “5 monkeys” experiment, an appeal to tradition fallacy of “doing things the way they’ve always been done,” a remnant of the past that is never truly questioned.

Why not roundabouts?

It is a statistical fact that roundabouts are safer, more efficient, more sustainable, and much cheaper to set and maintain than traffic lights. Yet governments insist on using traffic lights at intersections where roundabouts would have been much easier to implement. This is further evidence that government aims not to help you but to deliberately make your life miserable. No, people in government are not just incompetent - they are evil.

Why have traffic lights, then?

I can pinpoint 3 reasons why government prefers traffic lights to roundabouts:

1. Money: Traffic lights are a huge maintenance cost. People in government love spending other people’s money because the former always get a cut out of it. Historically, all governments tend to spend more and more and more each year (whether they have the money or not). The larger the government spending (with other people’s money), the greater the embezzlement and/or advancement opportunities for government bureaucrats. Contractors lobby corrupt government bureaucrats (with under-the-table “incentives”) to establish more traffic light intersections to make business for the contractors… and here we are. I have an uncle who is one of those contractors. The stories of corruption I’ve heard will turn your stomach - in something as simple as traffic lights, no less. The government will rather use an inefficient, costly, and deadly “solution” than to use something simpler and safer (many - if not most - deadly accidents occur at traffic light intersections where they could have easily been avoided with a roundabout instead).

2. State reliance: Traffic lights are purposefully inefficient, prolonging your commute, and making your entire driving experience less desirable. Governments instinctively want their people to have less and less independence, so that they have no choice but to depend on government more. The more you rely on government, the more powerful the people in government become. Every single government would ban cars altogether, if they didn’t fear mass revolt or a complete loss of faith in their bluff of authority. The US alcohol prohibition era taught us that government fears losing control by enforcing the unenforceable. So, governments enforce only what people are more or less OK doing without. This is why governments are so sly in their manipulative propaganda and disincentives against what they don’t like. For example, they are afraid to flat-out ban gun ownership or cars in populations where these things are considered vital.

   Governments evoke pretentious environmental concepts as justifications to keep taxing the hell out of your fuel and private car usage. They make it so difficult to own and use a car that most people in big cities have no choice but to use the government’s laughable mass transportation systems. And the more you use government “services,” the more government has you by the balls. Good luck revolting then when government makes another leap in overreach.

3. Psychology: Traffic lights serve as psychological conditioning for obedience. These lights instill a sense of blind orderliness and conformity, even when there is clearly no functional reason to obey them. Obeying a law just for the sake of it - not for its actual use - is what authoritarians want from their obedient population. Traffic lights also train you to lose trust in yourself and your own judgement, and to instead rely on mere lights to tell you what to do and when. Conversely, roundabouts don’t tell you when to stop and where. Their broken lines merely indicate where it would be ideal for you to slow down if there’s no incoming traffic - incoming traffic is your incentive to slow down, not your threat-based command. Roundabouts trust you to make the right call, so you have to trust yourself. Roundabouts don’t punish you for the victimless crime of stopping past a line of white paint. Traffic lights literally punish you for “stepping out of line.”

Red-light authoritarianism

Traffic lights are the perfect analogy for government: inefficient, dangerous, oppressive, based on threat - should you fail to obey a light, even if there is no need for you to stop like an idiot waiting for a light to tell you what to do. Obeying traffic lights is largely based on threat.

Roundabouts, on the other hand, are the perfect analogy for voluntary stateless decentralized self-governance: efficient, safe, free, based on incentive - you enter it whenever you deem it safe and necessary to enter. If you fail to abide by its simple rule structure, you will pay with a minor accident, and then you’ll have to take it up with your insurance.

In the absence of government, insurance premiums are one of the many ways to more effectively punish criminals. Obeying roundabout rules is based on incentive. And your insurance doesn’t punish you with a fine - the forceful seizing of your property. Oh no. Punishments in a stateless self-governed world are a deprivation of a privilege, not of a right, as is the case with government. In this case, if you keep driving like a manic, you risk losing your privilege of car insurance, all other insurance, or even driving on private roads. That’s it.

A roundabout trusts you to make the right choice. A traffic light treats you like a moron. No wonder people switch off when they’re stuck on the red: they are robbed of their agency, their initiative, their freedom. If you are treated like a moron 100 times a day, you may start believing it (much like the stupid and condescending “slippery when wet” signs).

A roundabout doesn’t give you a fine for crossing a silly white line that is meant to be an indication, not holy ground. A roundabout does not punish you for a victimless crime.

Roundabout efficiency

A roundabout is the perfect traffic merger mechanism. Traffic lights just give turns to traffic, slowing it down where it could have been faster with a roundabout instead.

It is true that roundabouts produce more accidents, but fewer serious ones than traffic lights in total. Traffic lights produce fewer accidents, but more serious ones, even fatal. It is rare for a fatal accident to occur at a roundabout, due to the angles of collision, as well as their structure, which forces drivers to slow down. And if they don’t slow down, then they’re likely to safely crash on a sidewalk or heap of dirt rather than the side of another car.

With roundabouts, you get more incidents, but they are mild, and rarely deadly. With traffic lights, you get fewer accidents but they are almost always severe, and often deadly.

Similarly, with government, you may get fewer disputes, since a singular centralized hegemony gets to dictate what goes and what doesn’t, so there isn’t any room for disputes anyway. But when disputes do happen under government, they are often unjustly resolved with no possibility for appeal (the whole judicial system of government is corrupt to its core). Other times, disputes under government have no way to be resolved outside of government monopoly of dispute resolution, so we get violent state enforcement, organized crime, and war - war is dispute between governments.

Objection 1

Here, an interesting objection emerges: “If governments are entities that function without an overlying authority governing their relationships, and if they do go to war with each other, doesn’t that prove that the lack of government brings war?”

A valid objection at first. However, it is easily addressed and put to rest.

One, most governments in the world, for most of their time, function in total peace and cooperation with other governments. They resolve their disputes with negotiation and trade, in other words, with incentives, instead of threats. This proves that entities can peacefully and orderly function without government, so we do not need any central-authority government at all.

Two, the usual culprits - the governments that seem to engage in war far more often than others - simply do so because the people making the decisions can get away with it. Equating governments with individuals is a false equivalent, in that, the incentives for individuals to play nice with other individuals are not the same as the incentives of governments to play nice with other governments. Why? Because of a transfer of accountability and cost: with government, some make the decisions, and others pay. As an individual, you are responsible for the consequences of your actions against other individuals. This doesn’t apply to government. The people in government who fail to negotiate, or even, who promote lucrative war, will never be held accountable, because they supposedly “represent the will of the people” - the people that nobody asked. The people making the decisions to go to war will never find themselves in a trench. And after the citizens - who never had a say in starting the war - brutally slaughter each other on the battlefield, the people who actually started the war get get to shake hands and laugh it out, and carve out resources that were left on wholesale due to the war they started. And their citizens are dumb enough to tolerate this. The people in government power will never ever be in any danger posed by the war that they cause or maintain - or at least, failed to prevent. This means that they are more likely to choose to go to war, because others will do the fighting, and others will bear the consequences. If anything, if politicians fail to avoid war, then the citizenry should physically drag them down from their ivory towers, and let them experience the horrors of the war they were too incompetent or negligent to avoid.

So, the fact that governments can function well with each other without the need for any overlying world government demonstrates that government is unnecessary. Even though the leaders in government aren’t accountable, they still find ways to peacefully negotiate, form trade deals, provide commerce advantages, and show to their “enemies” that they are worth more to each other as valued trade partners than as conquered enemies.

“Why have enemies when you can have friends?”

- Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur

When goods cross borders, soldiers don’t.

- Frédéric Bastiat

Objection 2

“Who will enforce roundabout rules, if there is no government to impose them? Ha! Checkmate!”

You have visited gyms, malls, shopping centers, private schools, and other privately owned businesses (or private roads). They all have their rules, some written, some unwritten. No one enforces private business rules using violence, as the government does. These rules are voluntary, which means that, if you want to use the business, you must abide by their rules. If you fail to adhere by the rules, then you may lose your privilege (not right) to use that business. And if there is enough market competition, then you know that these rules are as fair as they can get, otherwise you can easily just choose a different business that has more common-sense rules. This you cannot do with government that is an artificial, violently imposed monopoly of certain “services” that it so miserably fails to provide (lawmaking, policing, justice, etc.) A monopoly lacks the incentive and the market pressures to actually offer you good service. But I digress again…

Laws without government

If you fail to abide by the rules of your gym, you get barred. If you damage the business, and if there is no government for the business owner to complain to, then you increasing your risk score with insurance companies. How? The business owner will show how you caused him damage. This increases the costs of his insurance company, unless the insurance company asks from your insurance company to mediate (if you’ve ever been in a car accident, you know how insurance companies share information for individual risk scores). So, your insurance company will give you a choice: either pay for the damage, or increase your risk score, which means, increasing your premium. It can even threaten to stop covering you altogether, if you seem like an antisocial maniac not worth insuring. This is a threat to deprive a privilege (of insurance services), not a right. And when you have no insurance, then the gym owner can take revenge on you without increasing his risk score with insurance - since nobody’s covering you.

See how we can easily punish criminals without any government to do it for us? See how we can have social order without threats, but with incentives instead? In a free market, punishing anti-social behavior is even more efficient, effective, and beneficial. Plus, the way the free market “punishes” criminals is more likely to reform them, since it gives them a chance to redeem themselves, rather than just torture them in prison, and make them even worse.

Yes, we can have laws without government, if only government stops enforcing its monopoly on lawmaking, policing and justice. We can have a more orderly society, if only we stop paralyzing ourselves with the erroneous unfounded assumption that government is ‘the best we can get.” Telling yourself that a bad deal is “the best you can get” makes it true; it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if you can’t envision anything better, then nothing better will ever come. When you don’t see your potential, your right or your potential for something superior, then you are stuck having to do with less. This applies to your personal relationships, in business, and in public affairs. We accept violently enforced government instead of looking to voluntary decentralized self-governance… something to do with state-enforced schooling, as well as Pavlovian school bells and red traffic lights…

Objection 3

“But roundabouts take more space.”

Do they? You can have tiny urban roundabouts that force drivers to slow down even more. The only reason for large roundabouts is high-volume traffic, in which case large roundabouts give a higher probability for incoming traffic from all directions to merge. But is that wasted space when you can use the interior space of the roundabout as greenery that also functions as a mechanism to absorb an impact from a vehicle that fails to slow down? Its definitely better than the plastic water-filled impact absorbers that you see “embellishing” highway exits.

Even if you require a larger roundabout, but can’t build one due to space limitations, then you can always use bumpers to slow down incoming traffic, and thus give more opportunities for traffic to merge without stopping. You can also add a pedestrian crossing before the entrances of roundabouts - yes, using traffic lights, perhaps the only occasion when they are actually useful. With pedestrians crossings before roundabout entrances, incoming traffic can be artificially slowed down from time to time, if high-volume traffic from one direction is too much.

If we only consider the actual asphalt area of a roundabout as wasted space, then it is more-or-less the same (or less) than traffic-light intercessions.

Hypothesis

I am willing to bet that countries with a preference for traffic lights instead of roundabout intersections have relatively more submissive populations. A gallop asking people how much they trust government can measure this affliction of their, and then we can correlate with the ‘traffic light to roundabout’ ratio to see if this theory holds. I wonder…

The bottom line

Take a look at the agonizing inefficiency of traffic lights. You must blindly obey and stop at a red light, even on an empty intersection. Yes, some high-tech countries, like Japan, have been using smart traffic lights since the 90s - they monitor traffic from all directions, and adjust their timing accordingly. But still, there is the whiplash effect of time wasted between each individual vehicle as it decelerates and accelerates. Traffic lights are inefficient, both in time and energy consumption. Sure, they produce fewer mild accidents but they produce more fatal ones - statistically proven. But the people in government only care about the hassle - whether it’s a bump or a deadly head-on collision, they do the same paperwork. So, for them, traffic lights are the easiest choice.

Also, traffic lights are an extra fiscal cost that the oligopolies of the traffic lights industry will lobby to increase. It’s an easy and sure income for them, all at the expense of an unsuspecting public, who still erroneously assume that “we need government because road management.” If anything, we need to abolish all government specifically because of deadly inefficient road management.

Lastly, I suspect there is a deliberate psychological conditioning element to the broad use of traffic lights. Traffic lights condition people to be obedient regardless of reason. No one coming from any direction for miles? Doesn’t matter… You still need to obey the lights! You still need to “be a good law-abiding citizen.” You still need not question a dictate from the despotic state, no matter how illogical it is.

It’s just a fucking red light!

Now observe the grace and efficiency of a roundabout. Witness the performance, the beauty of such a simple yet awesomely productive system. It doesn’t require electricity or technical maintenance, and it doesn’t require yet another police-gangster on our payroll to direct traffic when the power goes down, or when there’s a - quite frequent - malfunction. It grants drivers the initiative to make their own decisions with regards to when to stop, slow down, or enter the crossroads. This conditions drivers to feel trusted, and therefore, it is more likely that they will accept agency in their decisions, and thus, hold themselves more accountable in all areas of life.

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