Other trips have simply been avoided, or done on foot. San Francisco removed a highway section , called the Central Freeway, that carried nearly , cars per day in The boulevard that replaced it now only carries around 45, daily cars and yet they move. Perhaps the biggest success story has been in Seoul, South Korea, where the city tore down a highway that was considered a vital roadway corridor, carrying , cars per day. Turn a lane highway into a 1-lane road and you might bring cars to a standstill.
Extend that same lane highway to lanes and you might never see traffic again or your city. So what can be done about all this? How could we actually reduce traffic congestion? Under the communist government, goods were given equally to all, with a central authority setting the price for each commodity. Because that price was often far less than what people were willing to pay for that good, comrades would rush to purchase it, forming lines around the block.
The U. And just like the old Soviets, Uncle Sam is giving this commodity away for next to nothing. Is the solution then to privatize all roads? This means raising the price of driving on a road when demand is high. During rush hour, drivers would have to pay a fee to use the most congested roads. Jean Andrey and Daniel Unrau found that traffic collisions increase by around 50 percent during snow and rain. From rainy or foggy weather, to the extreme snowstorm that stops drivers in their tracks, weather has an uncontrollable effect on not just traffic but road conditions as well.
Even a gentle rain can make an impact if all drivers slow down together. Something more serious such as a sudden mudslide could not only stop traffic but cause a collision if a driver happens to be in the wrong muddy place at the wrong muddy time.
This is an example of how weather can have a compounding effect on traffic by creating bad situations, or by making already bad traffic situations even worse. Read how you can protect your fleet from winter weather with a smart in-cab weather alert. Another factor that can cause traffic congestion is the case of a mechanical failing. Mechanical failings can also happen due to external factors such as a sharp object on the road, and can happen suddenly while driving, even if you just had your vehicle maintained.
While humans can help prevent and decrease mechanical issues by inspecting vehicles before every trip and making sure preventive maintenance cycles are followed, either way, these issues require the driver to get off the road. When other drivers rush to get around the stopped vehicle, it only further drags out the impact on traffic as drivers merge into surrounding lanes instead of stopping to let the person quickly get to the shoulder.
Again, while in some scenarios a driver may have been able to prevent the issue, even some of the most seasoned and responsible drivers can find themselves in these situations. The all-too-common cause of traffic is humans. From distracted or drunk driving to drowsy driving or emotional driving, there are many dangerous scenarios — even with our opposable thumbs and large frontal lobes — that humans trigger on the road.
Just taking a quick look at some traffic fatality statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration gives a plain view at the chaos our decisions can cause on the road:. The NHTSA report also found that distracted driving and drowsy driving declined compared to While distracted driving might not be causing as many fatalities, it is an area where driver behavior can impact traffic on a regular basis.
Once a driver slams on the brake because he or she was distracted, a ripple effect begins. Depending on other traffic conditions, this one mistake in braking could slow traffic in that lane and surrounding lanes for hours. Researchers describe it as the same ripple effect that a bomb makes. Read the Geotab report: Predicting traffic congestion with driving behavior. Do we then destroy them or turn the street into pedestrian and bike malls, banning automobile traffic entirely?
Or has anyone not thought that far ahead? Most likely the choice would be to destroy the trees or severely prune them unless by then we are all telecommuting or traveling with our rocket jet packs.
In that case I would favor pedestrian malls everywhere. The truth is that traffic congestion is caused by multiple causes and here they are not in the order of importance. These can be any of the following:. Sometimes it is the driver who insists on driving his car even if mass transit makes more sense. But that is more the exception than the rule. People usually tend to do what makes the most sense for them. Sometimes DOT is to blame by purposely making the signals out of sync turning your signal green and the following red at the same time forcing you to just miss it.
The DOT believes this will improve safety, especially around school zones, by forcing everyone to start and stop. However, in reality, all it does is increase air pollution, waste gas and time, and cause cars to illegally speed up just catch two green signals in a row, which would be otherwise impossible, thereby increasing danger not reducing it.
There is probably nothing more frustrating to a driver than to take 10 or 15 minutes just to travel 10 short blocks without any traffic, but because of ill-timed signals, increasing frustration and possibly road rage.
In one, they instructed 22 drivers to drive at the same speed Inevitably, traffic waves formed:. In one sense, it seems reasonable to blame these phantom traffic jams on individual drivers. The models indicate that these jams are more likely to form when people drive as fast as possible, then finally brake when necessary to avoid hitting the car in front of them, triggering a chain reaction.
Another way to think of it, says Berthold Horn — an MIT computer scientist who's worked on the same topic — is to try driving so that you stay halfway between the car in front of you and the one behind you. This will lead to you avoid sudden braking when possible. On the other hand, this sort of behavioral change doesn't totally eliminate phantom traffic jams — it merely makes them less likely to form specifically, it means that a higher density of cars on the road is required for traffic waves to develop.
But if there are enough cars on the road, even if people anticipate approaching traffic to the best of their abilities, phantom traffic jams will form. These jams, in essence, emerge whenever you have enough humans driving cars on a highway. So the only real way to eliminate them probably involves handing the wheel over to something other than a human driver. A prototype of Google's self-driving car. The straighter and smoother a road is, the less likely the jams are to form, since it means drivers won't be doing as much sudden braking.
Most highways are already built to be as straight as possible, so it's mainly by better maintaining current ones that this can make a difference. A more innovative idea, Seibold says, are variable speed limits , which are already in place in a few places in the US but are mainly used to alter speeds based on weather conditions. Using LED signs, speed limits could be decreased in the area leading in to a phantom traffic jam, causing cars to slow down gradually, rather than all at once.
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