Phantom Traffic Jams

  • A phantom traffic jam is when everyone slows down or stops, but starts to go again inexplicably (Photo source: Crazytales at Wikimedia Commons)

According the the last report from
the Texas Transportation Institute,
traffic congestion in the US causes
more than four-billion lost hours stuck
in traffic and nearly three-billion
gallons of wasted fuel. Lester Graham
reports mathmeticians have found – on
paper – one type of traffic jam looks
something like a bomb going off:

Transcript

According the the last report from
the Texas Transportation Institute,
traffic congestion in the US causes
more than four-billion lost hours stuck
in traffic and nearly three-billion
gallons of wasted fuel. Lester Graham
reports mathmeticians have found – on
paper – one type of traffic jam looks
something like a bomb going off:

Phantom traffic jams are frustrating. You know the kind – traffic slows downs or completely stops, and when you finally get to the end, there’s no wreck, no closed lane – nothing.

Mathematicians at MIT say these phantom jams are a lot like detonation waves produced by explosions.

Morris Flynn is the lead author of the report published in the online edition of Physical Review E.

“You have a single person who taps on their brakes. The driver behind them will over-react, hit their brakes just a little bit harder than the person in front. And this disturbance is just cascaded all the way back so that eventually you get this very rapid deceleration.”

And, phantom traffic jam.

Solutions: more lanes on the highway, and automated signs that warn drivers about slowed traffic ahead.

Or, get more people on mass transit.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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