Mathematicians have solved traffic jams, and they're begging cities to listen
BY ARIANNE COHEN
1 MINUTE READ
Most traffic jams are unnecessary, and this deeply irks mathematicians who specialize in traffic flow. They reserve particular vitriol for local transport engineers. They do not have competencies in the field of system-related increases in traffic performance, says Alexander Krylatov, a mathematics professor at St. Petersburg University. If engineers manage to achieve local improvements, after a while the flows rearrange and the same traffic jams appear in other places. Burn!
Krylatov would like to solve urban traffic jams forever, so much so that he has coauthored a book of new math approaches to traffic and ways to implement them. (Translation: Engineers, Let Us Handle This.) Four takeaways:
• All drivers need to be on the same navigation system. Cars can only be efficiently rerouted if instructions come from one center hub. One navigation system rerouting some drivers does not solve traffic jams.
• Parking bans. Many urban roads are too narrow and cannot be physically widened. Traffic-flow models can indicate where parking spots should be turned into lanes.
[...]
we can do it
(12,118 posts)apcalc
(4,461 posts)we can do it
(12,118 posts)Your daily commute is just that.
Lucky Luciano
(11,242 posts)That helps to reroute if necessary. If it cant reroute effectively, it can still estimate your traffic adjusted time of arrival. It also tells you where cops might be.
we can do it
(12,118 posts)apcalc
(4,461 posts)Without information. Information would make it worse? Makes no sense to me....
A navigation system would tell them where to go, what lane to be in, how to avoid jams....
Igel
(35,191 posts)It's that if one navigation system says to do something and another says something else, the traffic won't be efficiently routed. Or there'll be two navigation systems, independently saying to do something, and it'll just funnel the congestion a different way instead of dispersing it.
I see this on the freeway sometimes in a non-tech form. Everybody has access to the same information--up ahead it's congested, lots of red taillights, but it's hard to see over the next overpass. The frontage road, however, is fairly empty where the exit is, so everybody heads for the exit. The result is a huge backup at the stop light under the next overpass, and the freeway moves faster than the surface traffic. So exiting isn't the wise move.
If a single, all-wise navigation system had access to all the drivers' information, it would route some off the freeway and keep others on the freeway, so they were moving at the same pace. It would produce equality.
Thing is about equality--nobody wants to be inferior, but being "just like everybody else" is considered oppressive. We all want to arrive first.
pacheen
(58 posts)Both Waze and Google Maps route me through the worst neighborhoods in Chicago to save me a whopping 5 minutes commute time.