Traffic

Sometimes I just watch traffic. Traffic amazes me.

It can be any kind of traffic. Automobiles, foot traffic, whatever. Foot traffic is the one that really amazes me the most. Have you ever been in a place where there was a large central courtyard area, and a lot of people walking across it at once? If you have, then you can picture what I'm talking about.

You have a large open area, with a constant flow of people walking across it. They are coming from all different directions, and going in all different directions. There is no clear dominant path of traffic, no general direction of movement. Just a thousand paths crossing over each other in completely random ways.

And yet, you will notice that hardly ever does anyone have to stop. In fact, it is rare that anyone even has to change path to go around someone. Somehow, this great mess of overlapping trajectories is so logical and works so perfectly that it almost seems alive.

Of course, it's actually just people subconsciously observing the traffic around them, determining which paths will cross theirs, and calculating distance and speed in order to determine where they need to point themselves and how quickly they need to walk in order to avoid running into somebody.

That's traffic. Something so simple, so subconscious. And it blows my mind, sometimes.