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Trip to India

Indian traffic kind of sucks. Most people do not really follow the rules, lanes are optional, and there is almost always some form of gridlock.

What is funny is that underneath all that chaos, there is a weird kind of trust. You are basically betting that the people around you are rational enough not to hit you. You assume they care about not dying, not damaging their car, and not wasting too much time. In some ways, that feels like more trust in other people than in the US, where most of the trust is in the rules, not the drivers.

If you want to be a bit formal about it, every driver is solving a small constraint optimization problem in real time:

Objective: get to my destination as fast as possible

Constraints:

  • do not crash
  • do not get totally stuck
  • do not get yelled at too much

Given that, cutting someone off is "optimal" if it saves time and they are likely to brake. Honking is "optimal" if it increases your chances that they yield. Driving into a tiny gap is "optimal" if you believe the other person will flinch first.

The system works not because anyone follows the traffic code, but because everyone roughly shares the same objective and constraints. You trust that the other driver is optimizing a very similar function to yours. That is the core assumption.

In the US, the optimization problem looks different. You assume:

  • other people will mostly follow rules
  • you will get punished for breaking them
  • the system is designed to keep things smooth if everyone cooperates a bit

So you "optimize" by staying in your lane, signaling early, and relying on structure. You trust the system more than any individual driver.

India's setup is more like a massive, messy, decentralized optimization where every agent is doing local, greedy moves. It converges to something that works, but not very well. There are a lot of small wins and a lot of global inefficiency.

The US setup is closer to a designed system: more constraints upfront, slower in the short term, but with a higher potential ceiling if people actually respect it.

That is the interesting part to me:

  • A system can be stable and still be bad.
  • Local optimization can trap you in a terrible equilibrium.
  • Trust can exist even when no one follows the rules, as long as you trust their incentives and basic rationality.

Indian traffic is a good example of all three.