Traffic Jam

Examples include making working hours more flexible, planning your meetings a bit smarter, making better use of traffic information or using e-bikes. A small financial incentive is already doing a lot, especially in our trading nation. But even without this incentive, the alternatives are available to many. Returning to the metaphor of the fat man and his belt. If broadening the belt does not have the desired effect, would narrowing it be an option? It seems that people who want to lose weight buy a slightly too tight belt for some extra motivation for a healthier life.

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Login Login with twitter. Login Login with google. We are using cookies to give you the best experience on our website. Key to the study is the realization that the mathematics of such jams, which the researchers call "jamitons," are strikingly similar to the equations that describe detonation waves produced by explosions, says Aslan Kasimov, lecturer in MIT's Department of Mathematics.

That discovery enabled the team to solve traffic-jam equations that were first theorized in the s. Congested roads can be seen as an example of the tragedy of the commons. Because roads in most places are free at the point of usage, there is little financial incentive for drivers not to over-use them, up to the point where traffic collapses into a jam, when demand becomes limited by opportunity cost. Privatization of highways and road pricing have both been proposed as measures that may reduce congestion through economic incentives and disincentives.

Congestion can also happen due to non-recurring highway incidents, such as a crash or roadworks , which may reduce the road's capacity below normal levels. Economist Anthony Downs argues that rush hour traffic congestion is inevitable because of the benefits of having a relatively standard work day [ citation needed ].

In a capitalist economy, goods can be allocated either by pricing ability to pay or by queueing first-come first-served ; congestion is an example of the latter. Instead of the traditional solution of making the "pipe" large enough to accommodate the total demand for peak-hour vehicle travel a supply-side solution , either by widening roadways or increasing "flow pressure" via automated highway systems , Downs advocates greater use of road pricing to reduce congestion a demand-side solution, effectively rationing demand , in turn plowing the revenues generated therefrom into public transportation projects.

A study in The American Economic Review indicates that there may be a "fundamental law of road congestion.

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Highway Performance and Monitoring System for , and , as well as information on population, employment, geography, transit, and political factors. They determined that the number of vehicle-kilometers traveled VKT increases in direct proportion to the available lane-kilometers of roadways.

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The implication is that building new roads and widening existing ones only results in additional traffic that continues to rise until peak congestion returns to the previous level. Qualitative classification of traffic is often done in the form of a six letter A-F level of service LOS scale defined in the Highway Capacity Manual , a US document used or used as a basis for national guidelines worldwide. These levels are used by transportation engineers as a shorthand and to describe traffic levels to the lay public. While this system generally uses delay as the basis for its measurements, the particular measurements and statistical methods vary depending on the facility being described.

For instance, while the percent time spent following a slower-moving vehicle figures into the LOS for a rural two-lane road, the LOS at an urban intersection incorporates such measurements as the number of drivers forced to wait through more than one signal cycle. Traffic congestion occurs in time and space, i. Therefore, another classification schema of traffic congestion is associated with some common spatiotemporal features of traffic congestion found in measured traffic data.

Common spatiotemporal empirical features of traffic congestion are those features, which are qualitatively the same for different highways in different countries measured during years of traffic observations. Common features of traffic congestion are independent on weather , road conditions and road infrastructure, vehicular technology, driver characteristics, day time, etc. Road rage is aggressive or angry behavior by a driver of an automobile or other motor vehicle. Such behavior might include rude gestures, verbal insults, deliberately driving in an unsafe or threatening manner, or making threats.

Road rage can lead to altercations, assaults, and collisions which result in injuries and even deaths. It can be thought of as an extreme case of aggressive driving. The term originated in the United States in — specifically, from Newscasters at KTLA , a local television station , when a rash of freeway shootings occurred on the , and 10 freeways in Los Angeles, California.

These shooting sprees even spawned a response from the AAA Motor Club to its members on how to respond to drivers with road rage or aggressive maneuvers and gestures.



Congestion has the benefit of encouraging motorists to retime their trips so that expensive road space is in full use for more hours per day. The standard response to congestion is to expand road space somehow, perhaps by widening an existing road or else by adding a new road, bridge or tunnel.

However, that could well result in increased traffic flow, otherwise known as induced demand , causing congestion to appear somewhere else. Moreover, Braess' paradox shows that adding road capacity might make congestion worse, even if demand does not increase. It has been argued that traffic congestion, by reducing road speeds in cities, could reduce the frequency and severity of road accidents. City planning and urban design practices can have a huge impact on levels of future traffic congestion, though they are of limited relevance for short-term change.

Congestion can be reduced by either increasing road capacity supply , or by reducing traffic demand. Capacity can be increased in a number of ways, but needs to take account of latent demand otherwise it may be used more strongly than anticipated. Critics of the approach of adding capacity have compared it to "fighting obesity by letting out your belt" inducing demand that did not exist before.

For example, when new lanes are created, households with a second car that used to be parked most of the time may begin to use this second car for commuting. Use of so-called Intelligent transportation system , which guide traffic:. Traffic during peak hours in major Australian cities, such as Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, is usually very congested and can cause considerable delay for motorists. Australians rely mainly on radio and television to obtain current traffic information. GPS, webcams , and online resources are increasingly being used to monitor and relay traffic conditions to motorists.

Traffic jams have become intolerable in Dhaka. Some other major reasons are the total absence of a rapid transit system; the lack of an integrated urban planning scheme for over 30 years; [51] poorly maintained road surfaces, with potholes rapidly eroded further by frequent flooding and poor or non-existent drainage; [52] haphazard stopping and parking; [53] poor driving standards; [54] total lack of alternative routes, with several narrow and nominally one-way roads. Despite implementation since of road space rationing by the last digit of the plate number during rush hours every weekday, traffic in this million-strong city still experiences severe congestion.

According to experts, this is due to the accelerated rate of motorization occurring since and the limited capacity of public transport. Every day, many citizens spend between three up to four hours behind the wheel. In order to mitigate the aggravating congestion problem, since June 30, the road space rationing program was expanded to include and restrict trucks and light commercial vehicles.

According to the Toronto Board of Trade, in , Toronto is ranked as the most congested city of 19 surveyed cities, with an average commute time of 80 minutes. The Chinese city of Beijing started a license plate rationing since the Summer Olympics whereby each car is banned from the urban core one workday per week, depending on the last digit of its licence plate. As of , 11 major Chinese cities have implemented similar policies. A unique Chinese phenomenon of severe traffic congestion occurs during Chunyun Period or Spring Festival travel season.

Tomorrow is Good: will we ever get rid of the traffic jam? - Innovation Origins

People return to their hometown to have a reunion dinner with their families on Chinese New Year. It has been described as the largest annual human migration in the world. Traffic flow is typically directional, with large amounts of the population working in more developed coastal provinces needing travel to their hometowns in the less developed interior.

The process reverses near the end of Chunyun. With almost 3 billion trips [71] made in 40 days of the Chunyun Period, the Chinese intercity transportation network is extremely strained during this period. The number of vehicles in India is quickly increasing as a growing middle class can now afford to buy cars. India's road conditions have not kept up with the increase in vehicle numbers.

As a result, India has launched various rapid transit efforts, such as the Kolkata Metro , in Kolkata , and the Rapid Metro, in Gurgaon. According to a study by motor oil company Castrol , Jakarta is found to be the worst city in the world for traffic congestion. Relying on information from TomTom navigation devices in 78 countries, the index found that drivers are stopping and starting their cars 33, times per year on the road.

Daily congestion in Jakarta is not a recent problem. The expansion of commercial area without road expansion shows worsening daily congestion even in main roads such as Jalan Jendral Sudirman, Jalan Thamrin, and Jalan Gajah Mada in mid s. In , 12 people died as a result of traffic congestion in Java. They were among those stuck in a three-day traffic jam at a toll exit in Brebes , Central Java called 'Brexit'. Many people died because of carbon monoxide poisoning, fatigue or heat.

New Zealand has followed strongly car-oriented transport policies since after World War II especially in Auckland , where one third of the country's population lives, is New Zealand's most traffic congested city, and has been labelled worse than New York for traffic congestion with commuters sitting in traffic congestion for 95 hours per year , [79] and currently has one of the highest car-ownership rates per capita in the world, after the United States. In recent years, the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality has made huge investments on intelligent transportation systems and public transportation.

In the United Kingdom the inevitability of congestion in some urban road networks has been officially recognized since the Department for Transport set down policies based on the report Traffic in Towns in Even when everything that it is possibly to do by way of building new roads and expanding public transport has been done, there would still be, in the absence of deliberate limitation, more cars trying to move into, or within our cities than could possibly be accommodated. The Department for Transport sees growing congestion as one of the most serious transport problems facing the UK.

The Eddington Transport Study set out the case for action to improve road and rail networks, as a "crucial enabler of sustained productivity and competitiveness". He warned that roads were in serious danger of becoming so congested that the economy would suffer. There was, he said "no attractive alternative". A congestion charge for driving in central London was introduced in Despite these gains, traffic speeds in central London became progressively slower.

The Texas Transportation Institute estimated that, in , the 75 largest metropolitan areas experienced 3. Traffic congestion is increasing in major cities and delays are becoming more frequent in smaller cities and rural areas. According to traffic analysis firm INRIX in , [94] the top 65 worst US traffic congested cities measured in average hours wasted per vehicle for the year were:.