the best you can is good enough

Letting people into traffic is a hobby of mine. In rush hour, bumper-to-bumper, cars in side roads won't get into the traffic stream unless you pause a little and give them a space, which you traditionally signal by flashing your lights a couple of times, quickly, and hoping their morning coffee has kicked in. You can also do it a bit later in the day when traffic is still dense but moving more briskly; you need to time it correctly to slow down a bit earlier so you give the person ahead enough room without disrupting the flow too badly. It takes a certain alertness to scan ahead and note the opportunities, and every now and then a potential gap-taker is too asleep to respond in time, but it's still worth the try.

I'm committed enough to this that I have a scoring system; +1 for every car I let in, +1/2 if they immediately let someone else in (legitimate knock-on effect, they probably wouldn't do it if you hadn't just done it for them), -1 if I wasn't awake enough to let someone in when I had the chance. There's a certain amount of internal debate over every marginal case, to make sure the neutral 0 is warranted by the circumstances (driver not looking at me, oncoming traffic screwing up a gap, car has only just arrived at the intersection), and not an attempt to wriggle out of a -1. Game rules and the desire to avoid unwonted traffic dislocation state that you let only one person in if they're going the same way you are, and a maximum of three if they're crossing traffic in front of you. I usually end up the 15-minute drive to work with a score somewhere between 5 and 8; I figure that any more than that I'm probably slowing the flow too badly, and at around 10 the accumulated karma from all the irritated drivers behind me will probably explode all my tyres at once, with a sad little "pop".

I love doing this because it's a tiny, almost meaningless, perfectly tangible way of making people's days just a little bit better. Rush hour traffic is probably in my top 3 of Things I Hate About A 9-5 Job: it's a beautifully encapsulated distillation of all that is wasteful, unplanned, selfish and inefficient about our society, and it's rather pleasing to think that this is in some slight sense redeemable. The reward is in the miraculous change in expression in the waiting drivers: from the tense, anxious, frustrated peering into the traffic to a relieved wave, smile, hoot, flashed lights. The really grateful ones will wave as they pull out, and then blink or hoot as I close up behind them; I should probably add an extra bonus point for the ones who do all three, since I've clearly just improved a really bad day. And a lot of the pleasure is a more macro, organic sense that I'm somehow contributing to a communal system that works, that's about harmony and consideration rather than the relentless individualistic push-push-push our capitalist culture seems to approve.

The most difficult challenge is when traffic is solid but fast in both directions and someone is trying to turn across the traffic stream, a nearly impossible task requiring both streams to simultaneously stop. But occasionally you get the perfect moments like this evening's, when I slow momentarily to check the oncoming traffic, notice that someone else is slowing, we flash our lights at each other and simultaneously stop for all of fifteen seconds, and the three bottlenecked cars in the side road whizz thankfully out into our tiny, spontaneous, perfectly-co-ordinated gap. And when the two paused cars speed up we wave at each other, grinning like loons, and somewhere in the aether between us there's a disembodied high-five.