One of the things that struck me about Nairobi and other towns in Kenya was how much everyone behaved like adults with respect to traffic. Bear in mind that the roads in most of the country are totally trashed, there are few signals even in the largest towns, and there's an enormous amount of foot and bicycle (not to mention occasional donkey-cart) traffic. When the surface is bad, drivers use both sides of the road, the ditches, and any flat space they can find. Pedestrians cross the road pretty much anywhere. Almost every point along the sidewalk, someone is selling something: in a stall, on tables, or on the ground. It seems like utter chaos, but somehow it all works.

I don't know any of the statistics on traffic fatalities there, and I imagine they are far from good. But it's not really the point. It's more about the contrast with the average American attitude towards road rules. Yes, we like to break them, but we also like to have them, and I see people every day (that I bike, or drive) get INCENSED at other drivers, or pedestrians, who aren't doing what they're supposed to. Put scare quotes around "supposed to" if you like; very few people actually know the traffic laws, as any biker who's been accused of "taking up too much of the road" will understand. The underlying phenomenon seems to be the importance we attach to rule-based behavior. We like to be able to predict what other people are going to do; we believe that if everyone follows the rules, whether they're the ones enacted into law, or the ones we infer from our observations, things will be better.

Understanding this phenomenon goes a long ways toward explaining our national obsessions with (1) litigation, (2) technology, and (3) football. It may also explain our success in generating wealth, since almost every financial transaction rests on being able to predict with some degree of certainty what other people are going to do. After being in Africa, though, I wonder if it hasn't reduced us to behaving like children in the public realm, always threatening to tattle on each other.

As it turns out, at least one traffic expert, Hans Monderman, thinks that all this insistence on rules on the roadways is actually making us less safe.