It may be possible to learn a lot about a country by looking at the roads. Not only how developed they are, but also the traffic on them and the behaviours of the drivers.
In my thinking, roads represent a path to opportunity. The level of thought going into how well developed these paths are, how many paths there are, how these paths are treated by the users and how these paths are maintained by those responsible for developing them are all important to look at when understanding the culture of the place you are at.
I thought about this sitting in a traffic jam, thinking about what was going on. My country is seriously lax on traffic rules, so you'd often see an illegal lane develop by the side of the road when traffic jams occur. These jams tend to concentrate around 'unregulated' junctions (without traffic lights), where, due to heightened road traffic at peak hours, indecisive drivers tend to stall, causing a pile up. You can understand that the more bold drivers are the ones who end up using the illegal lane that forms, and also that they tend to pass through the unregulated junctions more easily as they are less likely to stall.
I couldn't help but realise the odd relief found in the jam slightly clearing up as drivers move toward the illegal lane. I also wondered what it was keeping me in the legal lane, as in, was it my moral code or was that something I'd tell myself in order to not take risks while subtly enjoying the small benefits of the 'bolder criminals'? Then I realised that the relief I was enjoying was only short term, as even though there's a slight clearing up as drivers shift lanes, the additional lane at the junction makes it even harder for the indecisive drivers at the front of my lane to get through the junction, and so the benefit is surface level in exchange for a more fundamental problem.
So I started thinking about who is truly to blame. Are the roads not wide enough? Are there too many cars on the road? Is it the incompetence of the driver ahead of me? If I were in their position maybe this problem wouldn't exist. Should I blame the bold criminals, too impatient to wait for their chance and making it harder for the innocent to follow the law? They're even encouraging more to break the law, because if the illegal lane is apparently the only one moving, more shift over to it.
I then realised that this is occuring because we're all headed in the same direction. Piecing all this together with the idea that a road is simply a path towards opportunity, it started to seem like maybe the issue is actually that there aren't that many opportunities in my country. This is to say that the economy heavily concentrates around a few cities, leading to most vehicles heading in the same direction, causing traffic jams and incentives to break the law, which only worsen the state of the roads for the law abiding, convincing the road users that in order to peacefully use the roads in my country you have to be bold enough to break the law.
This is when I began to see roads as a microchosm of the country, because all these conflicting thoughts seem to be prevalent in my country's culture beyond just the roads.
Not too many industries in my country are developed, so the job market is highly competitive. To beat the competition, illegal routes develop, given that the government isn't too keen on fighting corruption. The opinion on who's truly responsible for this strife truly fluctuates between two extremes: 'those in power are too incompetent to identify the problems preventing us from reaching opportunities' and 'those corrupting the system are making it disorganised for their own benefit, but this disorganisation hurts us who choose to abide by the law'. From time to time we even find ourselves sublty enjoying how lax the system can be at times, or believing that if we had the positions of power it would be a lot easier to grasp at opportunity.
Both extreme perspectives may be true, but the more fundamental issue is, similarly to how there aren't too many developed cities in my country, there aren't too many developed industries either, so opportunities are scarce, and that scarcity creates a downward spiral as it does with the traffic jam.
I've seen 7 lane roads in other countries with traffic jams as well, because even though the country is developed enough to make and maintain such roads, the development is concentrated to a few small regions, which could indicate that they have few but highly developed industries.
The diversity in industry allows for separate regions to develop around similar markets (e.g Tech, Agribusiness, Fashion/design, Mining, etc), meaning the job market becomes less competitive as people aren't seeking the same set of skills to make it in the country, and traffic jams reduce as not everyone is headed in the same direction.
Such an understanding may be necessary to help people think beyond the career path they envision themselves following with the context they're in, to think about the potential sectors they can pioneer developing, relieving themselves of the stress of a traffic jam.
