check out this wired article on the new wave in road construction.

no, seriously, it's fascinating. a clip:

The [traffic] circle is remarkable for what it doesn't contain: signs or signals telling drivers how fast to go, who has the right-of-way, or how to behave. There are no lane markers or curbs separating street and sidewalk, so it's unclear exactly where the car zone ends and the pedestrian zone begins. To an approaching driver, the intersection is utterly ambiguous - and that's the point.

well, the point is that eliminating top-down driving rules makes drivers more cautious, use their own judgment, and allows them to create their own norms for driving etiquette. evidence given suggests that this indeed makes roads safe and less congested.

the article criticizes the "old ways" of civil engineering – the days of the 5-lane highway - and instead advocates for more smaller, slower roads which strike me as similar to the kind that may have emerged spontaneously. government is said to make travel more organized and therefore safer, but perhaps those two concepts are not always linked.

it's worth noting that homes are still being taken every day for these road projects based on an old model of driver psychology, which may actually worsen the problem they're meant to cure.

one lingering question i have is how they enforce safe driving without rules - do they forgo preemptive enforcement, or is it subjective based on the officer's judgment of safe driving?

hat tip to reihan. title shamelessly stolen from subtitle in the article. i’m not that clever.

Labels: well being

a recent 17-year study claims that morality declines with prolonged involvement in sports, and that women have an equal share in this effect. what's more, team sports are much worse for moral development than individual ones.

"moral development" was gauged by measuring values such as honesty, justice, fairness, and responsibility, but only during athletic events. this seems to leave room for the possibility that sports do not lead to immoral people, but rather that athletes may not see athletics bound by the same moral rules (previous studies indicate this with other games). indeed, they may even see bending rules as part of the game.

we could tenuously link this to real-life by hypothesizing that athletic competition is similar to market competition (although profits and wins are very different). yet we must first ask if we really care about the values above in market interactions - a true market believer might say that these behaviors would be weeded out eventually if they harmed the consumer, for who would buy from a known dishonest company/person? therefore competition provides both the problem and the cure (although certainly harming lots of folks along the way - think enron). in team sports, at least, we can't see this; athletes are generally forced to play each other. in trade, not so much.

this, of course, all assumes self-report data on deontological surveys is valid in the first place. and that monopolies don't exist.

Labels: social