You Can’t Do Cooperation Alone

Between my rented lair and one of my favorite lunch spots is a quiet side street. It’s a charming little stretch, shaded by a canopy of oak trees so thick it feels like a tunnel. The street is narrow, just wide enough for two cars to pass, with on-street parking usually occupied by landscapers and repair trucks.  Traffic is typically light, requiring a brief pause for oncoming cars to pass.

Today, however, was different.

Instead of the usual handful of vehicles, there were at least twenty parked on the street. My initial thought was to weave through the gaps, but I quickly realized that due to flooding on the nearby main street, this quiet lane that’s the most direct route to my lunch spot had become a detour, and everyone had the same idea.

We were instantly gridlocked.

To proceed, cars had to inch past parked vehicles one or two at a time, while oncoming traffic was similarly blocked. The last time I saw anything this messed up was back when I lived in the panhandle of Florida, following one of the big hurricanes that had caused all the traffic to be rerouted through the road I had to take to him from work every day.  Before they four-laned the big bridge, we had the neck down from four lanes to two and hope that the lane parallel to us would allow us in. Too often for about a year, people in the inside lane would wait patiently to get onto the bridge while those in the diminishing lane would fly past all the way down to the point of merging and cut off the inside traffic. After the first few weeks of this, the people in the inside lane decided not to let the mergers in, and often they would ride two cars side by side all the way down all the way to the merge point, just to hold back those are viewed as cheaters. The merging lane turned into a battleground, with drivers aggressively cutting each other off.  It was a grand mess!

Not long after that, I was in the same situation in Europe, but nobody was plotting to get ahead of those patiently waiting, and nobody was plotting to keep out the speeders. When vehicles got to the point of merging, the lanes took turns. The traffic itself never actually stopped. That sort of cooperation was a thing of beauty.

So today, sitting in traffic I made a command decision to reset the situation.

As the car opposite me passed, instead of pushing forward and cutting off the next seven cars behind him, I paused to allow the next car in the line behind the parked vehicles to pull out and continue on its way.

But my action alone wasn’t enough. Success depended on both that driver and the next driver behind them and then next behind me.  We made eye contact, I gestured, and they understood.  A pattern was established, a silent agreement to cooperate.

Almost instantly, the gridlock transformed. What was a frustrating free-for-all became a smooth, efficient flow. That hot mess of everyone being out for themselves and getting nowhere almost instantly turned into a cooperative and fast flow so that we could all get where we needed to be.