anonymous question

There is already complete anarchy regarding pedestrians on the roads. In order to participate in road traffic, a pedestrian does not take any exams; they simply learn to walk—and then they walk. Infrastructure owners are interested in ensuring that a pedestrian arrives alive, solvent, and ready to spend their money at the place where they will spend it. Therefore, a pedestrian on a private street is fully looked after: they are physically separated from dangers, and efforts are made to move the points where they will spend money as close as possible to the places where, for some reason, there are many pedestrians.

But here is the trouble. Some pedestrians, wishing to make their movement even faster and more comfortable, get behind the wheel and begin to pose a danger to other pedestrians. How should the unfortunate owner of the street handle this situation if it is important to them that all pedestrians reach the spending point quickly and safely, even if some pedestrians have climbed into individual high-speed delivery vehicles? It becomes necessary to somehow reduce the risks of transport collisions by physically separating flows of different speeds and directions, and where this is too expensive, separating them at least logically—not in space, but in time, by organizing alternating movement in intersecting directions.

The same market logic applies here as in any other service sector: the more money there is in the market, the more profitable capital investments in improving service quality become. Therefore, in a remote village, we will see neither a sidewalk nor dividing barriers on the road, while in a metropolis, we see all of this and much more.

All these considerations are already in effect, despite the nominal existence of a “single centralized control,” and in its absence, they will work even better due to the absence of single centralized obstacles.