Matt Kenseth’s motor blew up very early in the race and Jeff Gordon went on the win the Daytona 500 this afternoon. The 2005 NASCAR Championship Season is underway and if you don’t “get it”, this is the best way I can explain the attraction. Traffic re-affirms my belief in the basic intelligence of people. In American society the majority of adults operate complex heavy machines in motion, while in close proximity to multiple other individuals doing the same thing. Traffic is common, almost always present at some level and remarkably safe for a largely self-regulating dynamic system.
It turns out that human perception and motor skills are by and large pretty good and that individual self interest does a remarkably good job of allowing people to pursue diverse and divergent goals on their own time schedule. Traffic works without centralized control or planning of the actual daily activities of people and it works regardless of the formal educational level of the participants. Aside from basic operating and regulatory instruction, almost all adult humans have the biologic intelligence to drive safely.
There are problems that occur with traffic but the reason only fatal crashes make the news is that these are exceptions in a system that functions extremely efficiently. The frustration most of us occasionally encounter with other drivers only makes the point that we expect traffic to work without problems. Humans are so instinctually good at driving that the best individuals can do it at for long periods of time at nearly 200 mph, and still have time to calculate how to beat another driver to a given point.
It turns out that human perception and motor skills are by and large pretty good and that individual self interest does a remarkably good job of allowing people to pursue diverse and divergent goals on their own time schedule. Traffic works without centralized control or planning of the actual daily activities of people and it works regardless of the formal educational level of the participants. Aside from basic operating and regulatory instruction, almost all adult humans have the biologic intelligence to drive safely.
There are problems that occur with traffic but the reason only fatal crashes make the news is that these are exceptions in a system that functions extremely efficiently. The frustration most of us occasionally encounter with other drivers only makes the point that we expect traffic to work without problems. Humans are so instinctually good at driving that the best individuals can do it at for long periods of time at nearly 200 mph, and still have time to calculate how to beat another driver to a given point.
