Apparently things like merging into traffic and stop lights, require a little flaunting of the law to keep things safe. Cities have found that red light cameras have the same effect: they increase rear end collisions, because not everyone realizes the crossing is monitored. It is for this reason, and the billions of dollars in fines these cameras generate, that many cities across America have stopped keeping records of these accidents.

It seems that everything works better, when traffic is allowed to regulate itself. This is nothing new. Ten years ago, the EU began experimenting with removing road signs, to improve the flow of traffic. The town of  Drachten removed all their traffic regulations. What they learned was astonishing.

“More than half of our signs have already been scrapped,” says traffic planner Koop Kerkstra. “Only two out of our original 18 traffic light crossings are left, and we’ve converted them to roundabouts.” Now traffic is regulated by only two rules in Drachten: “Yield to the right” and “Get in someone’s way and you’ll be towed.”

Strange as it may seem, the number of accidents has declined dramatically.

It turns out that when simple human courtesy is trusted above an intricate maze of laws and regulations, people figure out how to move around each other more efficiently.

This isn’t much different than the what was learned from the American Experiment. Back when this country was founded, all decisions in the rest of the world were handed down by Kings. Meanwhile, a handful of bold thinkers believed that humans could govern themselves more efficiently. And fortunately for history they were able to convince enough other people to found a nation on that idea. Americans were originally mocked for their simple beliefs, since no one of intellectual prominence believed that ordinary serfs could manage their own lives. Within 150 years that experiment had created the wealthiest, most advanced nation, the world had ever known.

It’s expected that the engineers over at Google will try and say it’s not their fault, that the accidents will be eliminated once every car is made driverless. Their designs of the future have cars with no steering wheel, or other passenger controls. They believe our roads should be a high tech rail system, and cars little more than shipping containers; like those things at the drive through bank, delivering you to your destination with no input on your part.

Americans should reject their vision. Cars supposed to be a symbol of freedom and independence, and roads shouldn’t be subject to closure from an Internet crash.

Besides, it makes it far too easy for the robots to win.