I drive a lot, so I’ve become interested in the reasons why traffic so frequently breaks down for no good reason and I have to sit on a perfectly good road where everything would be just fine if everyone did what they should do, which is drive straight ahead at a reasonable speed.
As a result, I’ve been reading a great deal about the technical issues concerning traffic flow, and I’ll be posting about them here occasionally. Civil engineering, after all, is a political issue.
For starters, the Wired blog on cars and car-related things has a short piece on the math behind random traffic jams. You know, the kind that you get to the end of and you think, “Where’s the accident? Where’s the construction? Why did I just waste an hour boxed in on a road made for driving at least 120 km/h — for nothing???”
Researchers at MIT say it has to do with the fact that when the person in front of us brakes, we want to be safe, so we brake harder than they do. It piles up. And thus Chicago’s Stevenson, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Edens Expressways turn into giant parking lots any given weekday from 8-10 am and 2-7 pm. And I’m sure it’s the same in most major and minor cities.
The full article is here: “MIT Hopes to Exorcise ‘Phantom’ Traffic Jams”
And if you’re the kind who feels happy to complain to their elected official about how the roads and traffic flow on your commute are so poorly engineered that they’re taking years off your life, here’s a website that helps you write to them and let them know: http://www.mycommutesucks.org
