The ritual of courtesy -- creating complex or uneqivocal places?

This empirical study describes three common traffic situations with associated user actions likely to occur at any complex regulated traffic place. It is a place where the traffic participants are lacking explicit formal traffic rules that are comprehensible and where they have to create informal social rules as they interact. The three actions in question were analyzed with an ethnomethodological method and they are interpreted as revealing important social rules of courtesy that help agents meet in a safe and effective way. The aim is to discuss the successful meeting in traffic by as rituals in a social drama and then compare actions at the complex regulated traffic place with actions likely to be seen at two types of formal and unequivocal regulation instruments -- the traffic light and the roundabout. It is concluded that formal regulation and formal traffic law cannot cover all possible actions likely to appear in traffic. Social rules of courtesy are used as a compensation tool covering the insufficiency in formal regulation and formal traffic rules.