I have read numerous items discussing how ants avoid traffic jams. I don't recall those items discussing the fact that ants run into each other in head on collisions all the time. That the system ("vehicles", drivers, roads) seemingly suffer no ill effects (other than having to slow down to a stop each time this happens) from these "accidents" isn't something I hear people talking about in how we should adapt to learn from the ants successful methods.
Russell Ackoff actually touched on this a bit with designing the entire system so all vehicles had bumpers at exactly the same height. But this is far from completely crash-tollerant design.
There are tiny ants all over SE Asia that run amazingly fast. I can see why this is a big advantage. They cover lots of ground. When they find some yummy thing they get back home and tons of buddies follow them to the reward. It is amazing how fast they ram into each other.
These ants are pretty amazing example of evolution. But you also can see how a pretty simple tweak of trying to lay out "lanes" for travel could help. The ones I watch don't seem to use lanes at all, so they are constantly bashing into ants going the other direction. Which they seem to cope with perfectly fine, but it has to slow them down and waste energy.
Evolution is amazing but it does often also end up with designs that have bits you could intelligently tweak to seemingly great advantage.
Related: Why Don’t All Ant Species Replace Queens in the Colony, Since Some Do - Traffic Congestion and a Non-Solution - Symbiotic relationship between ants and bacteria - Amazonian Ant Species is All Female, Reproduces By Cloning
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