This is exactly what taxation, regulation, laws, and the like are designed to solve (and what Nash spent a lot of effort studying [0]).
Buying and using a car is a great example of a "finite non-cooperative game". Everyone's self-interest in not dying drives them to make decisions that increase the chance of dying for everyone else. Everyone against everyone. Individual gains result in an aggregate loss for the whole population (everyone drives increasingly larger cars, dangerous to more and more people, i.e. cyclists, pedestrians, other cars, etc.)
The fact that the US government simply just allowed a cave-man-esque non-coop game to take hold is the most shocking aspect of all this, particularly when there is an entire field dedicated to studying this kind of phenomenon.
As someone who doesn't live in the US, how did it get like this? In my own country, higher taxes for larger vehicles and smaller roads luckily exist.
I disagree with the other comments that mention taxation as a solution, as that's just, obviously, egregiously, an awful tragedy of the commons.
Buying and using a car is a great example of a "finite non-cooperative game". Everyone's self-interest in not dying drives them to make decisions that increase the chance of dying for everyone else. Everyone against everyone. Individual gains result in an aggregate loss for the whole population (everyone drives increasingly larger cars, dangerous to more and more people, i.e. cyclists, pedestrians, other cars, etc.)
The fact that the US government simply just allowed a cave-man-esque non-coop game to take hold is the most shocking aspect of all this, particularly when there is an entire field dedicated to studying this kind of phenomenon.
As someone who doesn't live in the US, how did it get like this? In my own country, higher taxes for larger vehicles and smaller roads luckily exist.
I disagree with the other comments that mention taxation as a solution, as that's just, obviously, egregiously, an awful tragedy of the commons.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium#Examples