I think this is a pretty interesting phenomenon and I often struggle with how to handle it. I have pretty severe defensive navigation requirements where I tend to require active perception of velocity change before I trust obstacles are going to behave in the manner I expect ... and I think that mentality often leads to these kinds of outcomes.

I was recently in Amsterdam where there are many many bikes and many variations on the scenarios that can cause this to occur. I felt like I started to observe communication on the faces and trajectories around me that tried to convey a message about a kind of conscious morality for influencing the outcomes that results in these scenarios. There seemed to be a kind of social encouragement toward modulating one’s trajectory when possible in advance of where uncertainties could cause delay in order to have the effect of minimizing the required velocity changes — an expression that seemed to say “if you put yourself into a situation where uncertainty about your trajectory is likely to cause a group velocity decrease, you haven’t found the ideal path. Keep an eye out for opportunities to improve the group outcome in the future and have a nice day.” (Edit: Culture in the Netherlands is rather amazing)

> Keep an eye out for opportunities to improve the group outcome in the future and have a nice day.

I think what you describe just minimizes fuel consumption though.

I had not really considered that people might view it differently but thinking back on my experience in Canada, I remember being surprised at how much people would accelerate when the light turned green and how hard they would have to brake just seconds later at the next red light.

I think what I was trying to describe does more than minimize fuel consumption — at least assuming as I sort of was trying to imply that changes in velocity are a message passing component that is part of a distributed “proof of consensus awareness” which is then employed to maximize the likelihood of involved parties converging on the same set of safe trajectories. If applied widely — I think the principle results in reducing the number of interactions where trajectories come too close for safety margins and cause involved parties to introduce extra delay due to uncertainty in the other agent’s behavior. If you modulate speeds in order to reduce the occurrence of delay-from-uncertainty, you can ensure that one party doesn’t experience any extra delay at all rather than both being likely to, which is a net win as well as win-win as the person who does stop or experience delay will wait less time in total for the obstacle to clear.