Where I live the following was put into law:

On a two lane freeway you must remain in the right hand lane unless passing.

It's quite sensible.

At first glance it might seem like you are simply pushing the traffic to half the lanes, but when working properly it acts as a way to sort vehichles by speed.

However once there is enough congestion you often end up in this scenario:

The scattered cars in the right lane are usually going a decent amount slower than the flow of traffic.

This leads to cars doing using the passing lane to try and properly sort within traffic.

But considering the amount of cars now in the left lane almost everyone is going slower then what they are comfortable driving at so they remain in the left lane.

If you attempt to go back into the right lane, the slot you left is immediatley gobbled up by the car behind you and there will be no room to remerge into the left lane once you inevitably need to pass someone later on.

Most of this is common knowledge, but I think the disagreement I have with people is the psychological and societal conclusions people draw.

Like other 'tragedy of the commons' situations the assumption is that because of the shared, unmanaged, resource (the passing lane) and the law of large numbers it's inevitable that “man's greed” will dry up that resource.

But after spending too much time in traffic that really doesn't feel like the case.

Mostly it's just the impossible amount of information that needs to be communicated.

The key assumption people seem to have is that others aren't rational enough for the greater good as apposed to the greater good not being reasonably possible given the environment.

And this goes beyond traffic.

I'd say many interpersonal, communal, even global disagreements are based on different knowledge bases instead of how many times they can recursivly think about a topic.

Unfortunate AI aside

Many people inside the AI community were suprised by ChatGPT. Not because of it's capabilities, but that a simple UX change was enough to get global attention and usage on effectively the same model that has publicaly existed for 2 years.

In reality of course it makes sense because what 99% of GPT is used for isn't heavily rational tasks, but rhetorical ones.

LLMs are really great communicators. They translate information for you. GPT is a transformer, it's in the name.

What does this have to do with the freeway being annoying?

Well it feels like we got to this point for the same reason nobody agrees to go into the right lane. Coordination of knowledge.

Back to our Regularly Scheduled Conclusion

Let's be real I'm just trying to kill time in the left lane currently, and traffic is all I can think about at the moment.

Traffic == Big == Bad

Good luck on the not so open road.