[guiriduro]

The author thinks the parable they heard concerning silly traffic priority negotiation would be too horribly impractical to occur in real life; but they clearly have never been on a winding (mostly) single lane coastal road in Southern Italy, e.g. Amalfi. Silly and impractical negotiation between drivers is exactly how it works, or rather, doesn't. Although in this case it manifests the complete absence of planning rather than too much (the point of the article), because nobody sane would plan to allow tourist busses to travel bi-directionally on a geographically-constrained winding road that barely enables small cars to pass two abrest in many places.

[antiframe]

I understood the parable differently than you. The Amalfi coast is not the same as a small town main street in the United States. The crux of the parable is that planning and negotiation is useful when it its cost is outweighed by the benefit and not useful if it's more costly than the gains.