This is what I imagine the future of transport will be like - I get in my electric vehicle in the morning, and sit down as it takes off toward the destination I want to go. I spend the ride checking email, listening to music, or just relaxing, as the correct route is dynamically updated to avoid construction, traffic jams, etc. At the end of the journey that's cost me very little, gotten me safely to my destination, and had minimal environmental impact, my vehicle moves on to pick up other passengers BECAUSE IT'S A GODDAMN BUS AND BUSES HAVE ALWAYS WORKED LIKE THIS.

Taken to it's logical conclusion (where all road vehicles are automated) things like processing visuals becomes a lot simpler.

Most of the information will be preprocessed data - the road infrastructure, and knowledge of every other vehicle in the system. That's what it becomes - one homogeneous and optimisable system; not a single robot car making it's own decisions. Processing is done by servers in advance, not individual vehicles.

Real time visual processing then only has to be on the look out for things that are out of the ordinary, such as a deer running onto the road, and take caution. Something that is much easier to do when done with well coordinated cooperation with every other vehicle around you. The car behind isn't going to hit you; nor is the oncoming car in the opposite lane.

Even if every car in the situation doesn't have the stopping distance, they will all turn (where possible) in a coordinated manner to avoid or reduce collisions. The situation may be avoided in the first place, because the system knows about dangers specific to this stretch of road and will have limited speed and increase distance between vehicles appropriately.

If there is one thing that humans absolutely suck at, it's unspoken mass cooperation in an emergent system; our roads being the prime example.

People can't even keep the appropriate distance from the car in front to prevent collisions in an emergency stop; let alone leave enough distance to prevent traffic jams. Imagine a red light (real or virtual) turns green, and every car for a mile back accelerates at the same time. There's no queuing (the cause of jams).

Emergency services get a clear, safe and direct path to their destination.

Who knows, maybe the system even knows you have a flight reservation or a business meeting, or if you're just going to the mall or visiting friends and can prioritise intersections accordingly (though that is getting a little Orwell meets Skynet).

The hard part is going to be getting from our current fully manual and emergent system to a fully automated and coordinated system; but I'm really excited by the prospect it might happen in my lifetime.

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Both @Chairman_woo and @Rawhead are 100% correct.

Traffic behaves like a wave. Canceling the amplitude (not stopping and going all the time, rather going a constant speed) reduces the chain reaction.

If you really want to know the chain reaction happens because people are no machines. They need time to reaccelerate once stopped. This time adds up.

Here is an example of this: http://videosift.com/video/Traffic-Jam-Simulation

@scheherazade it's not about keeping space in front of you. It's about going a constant speed. You're parking lot theory seems to stem from playing Sim City too much.
I do realize less cars = less traffic. But jams will still occur. You just need two cars.

There's some confusion in the comments concerning the difference between smooth flowing traffic and fast flowing traffic.

These are not the same things.

Increasing the distance between you and the car in front of you to maintain a consistent speed will help to buffer the slinky effect in traffic.
It will NOT eliminate traffic jams.
You're actually reducing the efficiency of the highway and causing the slow down behind you to increase.

Decide what you mean by 'traffic jam'. Is it stop-and-go traffic or slow speeds? Follow this guy's advice to stop the slinky, with the negative effect of reducing average highway speed behind you. Fill in the gaps if you dread slow highway traffic, with the negative effect of creating more inconsistency in speeds.

Imagine every truck driver doing it. Traffic jams would be even bigger.

I'm no expert but everything I've ever heard/read from informed sources (i.e. people who study these things rather than random people on the internet) concurs with exactly you you just said there.

Traffic Jams supposed to act like longitudinal waves that snowball as they go due to people driving too close and needing to overcompensate. i.e. what starts as a few people braking a bit too much becomes 100's of people at a standstill a few miles down the line of traffic.

I think you are entirely correct to suggest that if everyone maintained a healthy distance and steady pace traffic would flow considerably more smoothly and many jams wouldn't even happen in the 1st place.

There are choke points but these need never take up more than a lane if people had some perspective and collective sympathy....

Unfortunately they don't and most (or at least enough) tend to drive like the impatient selfish twats they are. This makes biking gently past all of them in their self inflicted gridlock misery all the more satisfying (wouldn't be the 1st time I've sung the Trololol song while doing so either )

The roads have a capacity.
~15 feet per car.

100 feet of road will fit about 6 or 7 cars, bumper to bumper.
Alternatively, 100 cars will require 1500 feet of distance to fit.

If a driver keeps 30 feet in front of him, at all times, even when stopped in traffic, then that takes the total per-car size up to 45 feet.
100 feet of road now fits 2 cars.
100 cars now require 4500 feet of distance to fit.

The greater the distance kept between cars, the bigger the strain on road capacity, and the farther back the traffic jam will stretch.



Traffic jams in massive commuter areas do not exist because people are driving too close.

They exist because the rate of people entering the highway exceeds the rate of people exiting the highway, for a long enough duration that the highway 'runs out of room' to fit the cars.

You can widen the roads to increase capacity, so the traffic jam doesn't go as far back.
You can increase highway speed limits, so that people can attempt to 'evacuate' the highway faster.

(Travel-capacity in terms of cars-per-second of any given section of road, is 'cars-per-second-per-lane x number-of-lanes'. Increasing either factor will improve travel.)

...But you can't eliminate the jam.

The rate of 'highway exit' is determined by the number of exits, and the capacity of the exit roads to absorb traffic from the highway.

When people exit from a highway, they usually go into local traffic, and are met by a light within 100 feet.
Between the lights, and other cars looking for parking spots, pedestrians, etc, local traffic is a dog.

Highway traffic can't diffuse out of the exits fast enough, and the traffic backs up on the exit ramps, and then backs up onto the highway. Once the traffic backs up onto the highway, exiting traffic consumes a lane for queuing, which forms a choke.


Basically, to avoid a jam, the rate of people entering the highway can not exceed the maximum possible rate of people exiting and diffusing into the destination city.

Because 'everyone goes to work at once', and local traffic is not geared to rapidly absorb exiting traffic, the jams are unavoidable.

Driving with a massive space in front, refusing to fill in the gap, only uses up the highway's buffering capacity more quickly.
That leads to the 'complete' jam happening sooner, where traffic is queued all the way from the destination, all down the highway, and onto the feeder roads miles away, blocking local traffic elsewhere.




IMO, if people really care abut stopping traffic jams, they should put a commuter parking lot at every exit at major commuter areas.

When you exit off of the highway, you would immediately wind your way through a parking lot, and at the other end of the lot you would exit into local traffic.

The parking lot acts as a buffer, allowing the highway exit lane to not get backed up, and prevents the queue from building up onto the highway.

That way the traffic on the highway can travel without chokes.

Although, this would just move the "parking lot" occurring on the highway, into a literal parking lot. You'd still be stuck waiting a while, as the rate of people exiting the parking lot into local traffic would still be limited by the rate at which local traffic can absorb the highway traffic.

Basically, to have literally no waiting, the city streets absorbing exiting highway traffic need the same uninterrupted cumulative bandwidth as the highway.

In the end, if you want to fix highway traffic jams, fix city streets.




You can make the argument that keeping more space in front will make people more comfortable with driving faster, and traffic will move faster.
But, that faster moving traffic will merely more quickly arrive at the same clogged exit, and queue with the same other cars waiting to get onto the local roads.

-scheherazade

@shatterdrose

Agreed, don't film while driving and the free market is very much like a highway.

At times things zip along quickly, but the selfish motives and aggressive acceleration and deceleration of the typical commuter are the main causes of both volume-related and collision based traffic jams. In much the same way, the risky bets in a Wall Street boom result in a painful economic correction or financial traffic jam.

In fact, there's now a mathematical model that demonstrates the cause of traffic jams (the bilateral-control algorithm.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nk87bwAL6PI

This started long before 9/11, that attack just "created a threat" where every congressman was willing to hand out every right that people had accumulated to that day. NSA tried to stop 128bit encryption back in the 90s when the first rumors started circulating in tech community. Encryption was seen as a "threat" to national security. Sound familiar? 9/11 gave NSA the money to do what they were after, at the time they wanted it the most. I've known most about their goals for 15 years, just never thought it was going to be this bad so soon...

NSA used the basic principle of internet, which is trust between nodes to route data from A to B in the most efficient manner possible. In the future, this means that the open architecture has to be stripped in favor of trusted, fixed nodes. That means the end of net neutrality. It also means congestions, traffic jams, huge blackouts when regional nodes go out. And it's the end of freedom in the surface web and the absolute end of deep web.

We are screwed unless this system is taken out NOW and made in to the list "crimes against the humanity" at International Courts. A year from now is too late.

That was what I was thinking. They were pulled over far in advance, I would guess due to a prior emergency vehicle going through. Sure there were a few stranglers trying to sneak ahead of the traffic jam some, but for the most part everyone was parted long before they would have heard the ambulance coming down the line. From the looks of the wreck they came up on at the end, I'd guess they had been waiting for some time already.

It's not just Germany that this sort of thing happens - I saw the same thing happen here in the UK about 6 months ago. I was stuck in the traffic jam at the time, and you could see everyone pulling to the side of the road as they noticed the oncoming ambulance... it was almost as if it had been rehearsed beforehand....

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