International Law

Self-Organized Traffic Flow

Book cover via Amazon

I have become a fan of Tom Vanderbilt's How We Drive blog, although I did miss seeing him when he came to Toronto on his book tour.

He raises so neat and counter-intuitive ideas about coordination in the most unlikely setting - driving.

"Although the behaviour of individuals is often simple, the collective patterns to which it leads can be counter-intuitive, making common sense a faulty guide to what might happen.

For example, it is generally true that traffic jams become more likely as traffic density increases.

It's not always the case, though, as Helbing's group has shown. Consider a two-lane road carrying both cars and trucks, where the cars are moving faster on average.

At low traffic densities, the cars have plenty of space to overtake and can easily pass the trucks.

As the traffic density increases, drivers find it more difficult to overtake because other vehicles are in the way.

However, evidence from simulations and real traffic flows shows that at a critical density of traffic, the obstruction to lane-changing begins to have a beneficial effect.

Because drivers tend to stay in one lane, they disturb the flow of traffic less, leading to a higher total throughput of vehicles."

Not an obvious insight.  Now, how could traffic be better coordinated so that more people saw that less people were trying to pass, so then less people tried to pass, until the traffic density decreased?

These type of coordination problems with the immediate social feedback that the net can provide may produce entirely new mixed market solutions.

We are prone, in areas of uncertainty, to look around at others for the correct clues to action: be nice if this social proof constructs produced more than financial bubbles and other ponzi schemes.

Full post as published by Misleading Advertising Law on August 29, 2008 (boomark / email).