Our primary mode of transportation, the mode of the automobile, is - in keeping with its nature - completely overrun with, or largely driven by - no pun intended - private motive. What I mean is that for any given traffic-filled street, to do anything at all, or to get anywhere or go in any direction, you must compete with many others that have private motives of their own, which often conflict with yours.
The very form of the infrastructure itself allows for the forceful assertion of private interest, or the will of the individual who controls an independent and self-contained vehicle for transport.
The functional need to traverse space and close distance is necessarily coupled with prevailing social instincts, which themselves gave rise and sustenance to the automobile as the dominant form of transportation.
A majority of the drivers on the road in an American urban environment are not only concerned about traversing a distance, but doing it as quickly as possible. Further, under cursory observation, what many drivers are interested in from moment to moment is not an absolute minimization of travel time, but a relative accomplishment of traveling faster than and being in front of their closest peers, which gives rise to a variety of traffic patterns and occurrence of accidents, given the constraints of road and signal infrastructure and traffic law.
The simple act of traversing space becomes a tense psychodrama in which a majority of the drivers on the road must best each other in the skill of driving. Granted, there are all sorts of motivations spanning the wide open road, but especially in the city where the heat and pressure of private gain begets more of itself, more drivers find themselves pulled into a consciousness where the others around them need to be surmounted or at least defended against, and it produces a social environment of its own.
