I've driven all over the United States and Europe, and despite stories you may have heard, Europe is not that bad. Most of the horror stories I hear come from Italy. I rather enjoy driving in Italy. It is close quarters and fast, but it is ordered chaos. I have never been yelled at, beeped at or even gestured at with any number of fingers in Italy. Why? Because I get it. Everyone has someplace to be, everyone wants to get there and no one considers themselves of higher importance than anyone else. One of my colleagues from another car magazine summed it up perfectly. Italians, and many other Europeans, drive like communists. They leave their egos outside the car and just get to where they need to go. In traffic circles, you dive right in, in whatever space you can find. If you don't disrupt the flow of traffic, nobody cares. The drivers that get the horn, the yell or the finger are the ones ruining the flow of traffic for everyone else. If you're lost, just keep driving. Everything circles back around. Whatever you do, don't stop in a straight lane to try and get someone to let you into a turn lane. It's your mistake, suck it up, be a man and deal with it. Don't ruin everything for the collective because you weren't thinking ahead. This is a big problem in the U.S. Everyone thinks the entire world needs to suffer because someone else couldn't think five feet past their hood.
So what would this mean to traffic modeling? Well, in a situation like Italy, where we don't have to pay as much attention to random acts of stupidity, you end up with what is essentially a two-dimensional problem. For every road we have speeds on feeder roads and traffic saturation for the road. That is easier, isn't it? Next time you're on the road, just remember, you're no more important than anyone else. The left lane is the passing lane, and keep your off-road vehicle where it belongs-off the road.