Is there a demon in you?

Do you become a different person behind the wheel of a car? Do you curse and swear at others, or use the one fingered salute? Perhaps you're a little more constrained, and limit yourself to whinging about the inefficiency of the traffic lights or why you need to stop at a stop sign when there's no traffic to give way to. And let's not get started with arbitrary speed limits and the fear we live with every time we see a police car, watching in the rear view mirror if we'll see the U turn and the flashing lights come on. When you're sitting at a red light and it turns green, and the vehicle you're waiting behind hesitates, don't you give them a little toot? or a couple of annoyed ones?

If there is one argument raised most often about why we need to pay taxes and why we need governments to impose rules on us, it's the roads. Roads are our classical public good, and the road rules our classical call for rules. The governments organise and fund the roads with tax money, they register and licence vehicles, and enact road rules and make new drivers pass tests on the rules to get driver licences. Although it doesn't take a lot of imagination to envisage private and commercial provision of roads via tolling, envisaging the end of traffic lights is beyond the comprehension of most people -- they're so ubiquitious, and the realities of congestion and crashes makes them seem so necessary. And yet, they're not only not necessary, in most cases they're not desirable either.

Frustration, anger, rudeness and conflict are signs of poor institutions, and yet this is what the government's traffic rules and traffic lights have produced. With traffic lights we can change the institutions at the flick of a switch: turning the lights off. Perhaps it is obvious that few would have the courage to even give it a try, yet we're blessed with some examples of courage to help us contemplate a more civilised (and efficient) world. If you want to exorcise the road rage demon, turn off the lights! (and for the observant, you will notice that the 'interactional expectancies' John Hasnas talked about in this paper as the basis of the development of customary law I covered here develop rapidly in response to turning out the lights.)