The 4-Way Stop

Shunned

Now, I am all about paucity of traffic lights, but it is pretty unbelievable that no matter where you are, or what you're driving, or the amount of cars on the road - no one knows what the hell to do at a 4-way stop.  Throw in pedestrians and it's as though every driver involved reverts to an infantile state of unknowing (or to the average IQ of a Rock of Love viewer).  Except me, of course, leading to a categorical shunning of this particular traffic rule.

What confounds me, in this tech savvy age we live in, is how the following scenario has existed for the past sixty years, at least....let me set the stage:

Driving, driving, driving....
4-way stop....
full stop...
another two cars have stopped on the street perpendicular, one going east and one going west...
wave to the car to the right of you (or give a quick bow and mouth 'sumimasen' if you live in Japan)...
no one moves....
press the gas on the car (because you are a take-charge kind of person)...
quickly brake because the other cars have started to go....
repeat until all cars have encroached into the intersection and someone guns it...

How is it, in a world where we can convey our most intimate secrets in 140 characters or less, or where we can reveal the status of our bowel movements on facebook, we cannot come up with something to take the guess work out of the 4-way stop.

Transportation civil engineers of the world, I implore you, get some sort of gadget or widget that lets people know who got there first, then give them a little green arrow, and we'll all be so much the better for it. 

While the 4-way stop is one of the few transportation mechanisms that induce us to acknowledge other human beings outside of the confines our car, the dance it getting pretty old..,