Dangerous drivers foster social dilemma structures hidden behind a traffic flow with lane changes

Abstract

Motivated by the fact that there are quite a few ill-mannered drivers who disregard traffic rules concerning lane-changing and maximum speed, we investigated an interesting question: whether or not social dilemma structures can be formed from a frequent dangerous lane-changing attitude in a typical traffic flow without any explicit bottlenecks. In our model system, two classes of driver-agents coexist: C agents (cooperative strategy) always keep to traffic regulations with respect to lane-changing and speed, while D agents (defective strategy) disregard them to move ahead. In relatively high-density flows, such as the metastable and high-density phases, we found structures that correspond to either n-person Prisoner's Dilemma (n-PD) games or to quasi-PD games. In these situations, existing ill-mannered drivers create heavy traffic jams that reduce social efficiency.