(July 13, 2013 at 4:50 pm)apophenia Wrote: Not to spoil a good bit of sarcasm, but there's good evidence that the rules of the road emerged independent of any forced uniformity, largely due to the mechanics of transport at the time, and when those mechanics changed, so did the consensus view on which side of the road to travel upon. Furthermore, I suggest that such a system would be meta-stable in the way that spin glass is in that even if there initially were a random distribution of conventions regarding which side of the road to drive upon, it would quickly converge on one or the other solution as a simple practical result of the higher cost of bucking the consensus. (Not to mention the fact that there are independent incentives to cooperation regardless of any higher authority. As a practical matter, it's unwise to assume that any simple system will not exhibit emergent self-order, independent of actual evidence.)
Not to pop your bubble, but even if such a convention were to arise and broadly apply to general populous, such a country would still have a much higher rate of traffic accidents and casualties if there isn't any higher authority to impose the convention. This is something I see happening in my own city everyday. If there is no traffic police in sight, a lot of drivers choose to drive against oncoming traffic rather than making a legal U-Turn down the road.
