By Adam Phillips, from Unforbidden Pleasures, which was published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Phillips is a psychoanalyst and the author of more than fifteen books.

Traffic changed in the United States after the First World War, when the traditional mutual accommodation travelers had been making to one another on their bikes and cars and carts was replaced by a set of lights. The purpose of the signals, according to the anthropologist James C. Scott, “was to prevent accidents by imposing an engineered scheme of coordination.” The proliferation of vehicles and the new scientific and bureaucratic fantasies…