Taking the Driver Out Of Traffic

Traffic. Just the word itself can generate varying degrees of anger depending on what kind of person you are, or more importantly, where you live. Traffic varibles like highway configuration, volume, speed limits, and the behavior of the crazies you have to share the road with contribute to the amount of traffic in a given area. Living in Upstate New York, I don’t tend to get wound up when I read "traffic ahead". My morning commute takes me south on highway I-87 and consists of 13 miles of highway driving with roughly half a mile of off-highway driving on either end. On the weekend, this route will take me no more than 12 minutes, drivng at around 75mph. A rush-hour commute during the week will take me 30 minutes to drive with an average speed of 30mph. If there’s an accident, it has taken me as long as an hour to cover the same distance. The obvious conclusion is that it’s because of volume, but how does that explain the accident travel time? Continued…

This cool article, "The Science of Traffic Jams," makes it clear that the reason traffic exists is because of varibles. We don’t all drive the same exact speed, we don’t all have the exact amount of patience, and we don’t all have the same exact reaction times. So the obvious solution would be to… remove us as drivers. The technology we have today could allow us to be passengers in our own vehicles.

One such technology that could be used is "ACC" or Active Cruise Control, which uses a series of radar sensors to maintian safe distances between vehicles. This woud eliminate the variable of reaction time completely, and the need to brake suddenly for what seems like no apparent reason. Companies like BMW, Mercedes and Volvo have all dabbled in technologies like this with the goal of creating an accident-proof car.

There are computer programs that generate traffic simulations for the purpose of engineering better roads. One computer simulation I found demostrates pretty well how easily traffic can be generated by just one car out of sync with the others. The interesting part comes in at about 3:43. You’ll notice over the course of about 10 seconds that a traffic jam begins to appear out of nowhere in the bottom portion of the track. Even more interesting is the fact that it begins to walk itself around the track as cars are entering the traffic jam faster than they can leave it. On my morning commute I see this exact scenerio play out day after day, and it’s the reason that I stick to the slow lane and cruise.

I know that when I go in to work in the morning that I’m pretty much on auto-pilot anyway, eating my Pop Tart and zoning out to the radio while I turtle along. So my question to you is this: Would you relinquish control to a computer if it meant a smoother and faster commute?