Decentralized Brilliance: Why Roads Work and Trains Don’t
Roads are what you get when you let the people decide.
They’re cheap. Flexible. Distributed. They don’t require central planning — they are planning, done in parallel, bottom-up, by millions. Every driver chooses their route, their timing, their mode. And from that decentralized swarm of local decisions, something astonishing emerges: a transportation network that scales, adapts, and evolves.
Trains? They only work when the stars align — when population density is absurdly high, routes predictable, demand constant. Otherwise, they’re fixed, fragile, and catastrophically expensive. You have to get it all right in advance.
Roads, you don’t. They’re the free market made asphalt.
Trains are the five-year plan — brilliant on a whiteboard, brittle in reality.
One empowers.
The other presumes to know better.
And it’s not just philosophical. In my earlier research, I showed that city highway networks — when left to evolve under real-world pressures — tend to converge on the same mathematically optimal structures we see in biological systems like the brain.
These aren’t centrally designed, but they end up looking like they were — because millions of decentralized decisions are smarter than any planner. Roads aren’t just free-market elegant in theory. They’re biologically brilliant in practice.
https://www.changizi.com/uploads/8/3/4/4/83445868/citybrain.pdf