I used to love driving.
There’s something about being behind the wheel, the quiet control of it, the way a good road can feel like thinking clearly. But somewhere in the last few years, that changed. Now, every time I sit behind the steering wheel, which has become increasingly rare, if I’m honest, I come back feeling worked up. Not just tired. Worked up. At the grotesque thing our roads have become. At the aggression, the noise, the sense that everyone is simultaneously rushing and going nowhere.
It took me an unexpected detour through economics to understand why.
Three years ago, I stumbled upon game theory. And I haven’t been able to look at a traffic signal the same way since. I know, it sounds like something from a dusty textbook. But stay with me. At its simplest, it’s just this: my outcome depends on what I do and what you do. And when you look at our roads through that lens, everything starts to make sense, and break your heart a little.
The Signal That Says Everything
Picture a busy intersection at 9 AM. The light is red. Cars are inching forward anyway. Someone cuts a lane. Then someone else does. Then three more. By the time the light turns green, everyone is so entangled that nobody actually moves.
Here’s what’s wild: each of those drivers is being completely rational.
“If I wait, the guy next to me will cut in, and I’ll lose two minutes.” “The light will go red again, and I’ll miss it.” “Everyone else is doing it anyway.”
This is what economists call a Nash equilibrium — where everyone is playing their best move given what everyone else is doing. The problem? It’s a terrible outcome for all of us. We’re all losing, together, because we’re all winning individually.
And then this contrast never stops amusing me: the same Indian who just cut three lanes at a signal will stand in a perfectly orderly queue at the metro twenty minutes later. The same person who spams both lift buttons will hold the elevator door open for a stranger.
We are not chaotic people. We are people responding to chaotic design.
The Cost We Don’t Calculate
The damage doesn’t stay at the intersection. It radiates outward in ways we’ve stopped noticing because we’ve simply accepted them.
Take the way we buy cars. At some point, the conversation shifted, quietly, without announcement, from “how does it drive?” to “how much can it take?” Ground clearance. Suspension. Boot space for the apocalypse. We optimise for survival on our own roads, and the market responds accordingly. A car that could be a joy becomes a defensive weapon. The dream quietly hollows out.
Or think about what our roads are teaching the next generation of drivers. Young people watching traffic learn that breaking rules works, you get ahead, and you rarely get caught. Indiscipline gets internalised as a strategy. That’s not a character flaw. That’s an education.
And then there’s time, our most finite resource, being treated as the cheapest thing we own. Every blocked junction, every unnecessary honk, every light jumped to gain three metres: it all collectively signals that we don’t believe our time is worth protecting.
Game theory doesn’t say people should behave. It says: when everyone’s best short-term move creates a terrible long-term outcome, you have a design problem, not a morality problem. That reframe, moving from “why are Indians like this” to “why does this system produce this outcome, “ changed everything for me.
The Fool at the Stop Line
So what do I actually do about it?
I used to spiral here. “If I’m the only one playing differently, I just lose.” And honestly? Sometimes that’s exactly what happens. You wait behind the stop line, everyone around you lunges forward, and you feel like the world’s most principled idiot.
But here’s what I keep coming back to: in repeated games, situations we play over and over with the same people, cooperative strategies spread when enough people model them consistently. You don’t need everyone to change. You need a critical mass. Change doesn’t start at the top of a broken system. It starts at the edges, with people who decide to play differently and keep playing differently, even when it costs them.
So I’ve built a small, unglamorous playbook. I don’t block intersections, even when I can gain a few metres. I join the back of the queue. At lifts, I let people exit before I enter. None of it makes me a saint. Most days, it makes me the slightly self-righteous person muttering to myself in traffic.
But civic life, the bare minimum of it, the version where roads work and queues hold, and strangers extend each other basic courtesy, doesn’t improve through policy alone. It improves when enough people decide that their behaviour is a vote. Not a sacrifice. A vote.
I still don’t love driving the way I used to. The roads haven’t changed yet. But I’m trying to remember that someone has to go first.
It might as well be me.
Diamond Dogs 
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