When WILL We Optimize Road Traffic?

You really ever look at how you drive your car to a destination? Not necessarily how you handle the vehicle but how you handle the situations going from point A to B. I know I’m a one-hand eater/driver in my car. I’ll set up a bag of fresh onion rings (yes FRESH) in the passenger seat, send the ol’ right hand into the bag, and pop the tasty fried rings into my mouth while ol’ lefty is handling the car. Sometimes this makes me do things like merging very early or very late on off-ramps, miss an occasional street (followed by the sloppy course correction), or drop a onion ring on the floor (which invariably causes me to take a quick glance down which could lead to disaster). These type of habits and more affect how we get to a destination and how we handle traffic. Josh McHugh at Wired Magazine talks about the way we drive and how it isn’t optimal in the slightest:

Tom Vanderbilt’s Why We Drive the Way We Do Unlocks How to Unclog Traffic

By Josh McHugh

Driving down a New Jersey highway three years ago, Tom Vanderbilt decided to stop being a goody-goody. He fought the urge to merge at the first indication that his lane was ending and rode it right to the pinch point, wedging his way in front of a furious driver at the last second. Racked with moral misgivings, he eventually looked into the science of merging and discovered salvation in high math, which proves he made the right choice — and not just for his own time-saving benefit, but for humankind (or at least commuter-kind — the seemingly selfish strategy keeps traffic moving faster for all). “It doesn’t have to be an ethics problem,” Vanderbilt says. “It’s really a system-optimization issue.”

That’s when he decided to write Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us). As part of his research, Vanderbilt set up Google Alerts to notify him about traffic-related news. “Half were about road traffic, and half were about Internet traffic,” he says. Unfortunately, drivers have a major disadvantage relative to data packets flowing across the Web: Humans think too much. Packets go where they’re told rather than relying on the scraps of incomplete intelligence and “superstition,” as Vanderbilt calls it, that humans use when choosing how to get from point A to point B.

We really don’t have a wealth of information in front of us when driving. We can’t see that far ahead in traffic so we do become “superstitious”. “I’ll take Lee Avenue instead of Brown Road because those drivers are crazy on Brown” may be totally wrong since Brown Road traffic is moving faster and smoother. But a few occurrences with those “crazy Brown drivers” makes us feel that the slower Lee Avenue route is better. More from the article:

Drivers make shortsighted decisions based on limited information — a combination of what they can see and traffic reports that, even at their most sophisticated, are an average of 3.7 minutes old. At 60 mph, that’s a 4-mile blind spot. “The fundamental problem,” Vanderbilt says, “is that you’ve got drivers who make user-optimal rather than system-optimal decisions” — a classic case of Nash equilibrium, in which each participant, based on what they believe to be others’ strategies, sees no benefit in changing their own.

Those who seek a more efficient traffic solution use not only network topology and queuing theory but psychology and game theory, too. A typical puzzle: Waiting for an on-ramp metering light — a mild and remarkably effective congestion-control measure — has been proven to rankle drivers more than merging directly into a traffic jam. “What bothers people is that they can see traffic flowing smoothly,” Vanderbilt says. “So they think, ‘Why should I wait?’ They tend not to accept that the traffic is flowing smoothly precisely because of the metering light.”

Also the classic “what you see is not really what you see”. We see traffic doing one thing, make a user-optimal decision, and then act on it when it may be wrong for the entire traffic system. And then we react in our wonderfully colorful American ways! More:

What about faster, better traffic info? One new technology, Dash Navigation’s GPS-based social networking system, may be a step toward dynamic traffic routing, but only for those who have Dash’s device, and maybe only temporarily. Suppose Dash were to become the hit its backers — including VC firms Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — hope it will. As soon as drivers have all the information about which routes are congested, they’ll divert to others that are clear. But if enough people do this at roughly the same time, the clear routes become jammed. Vanderbilt laments this as the inevitable “death of the shortcut.”

The obvious answer, then, is to make the road network as efficient as the information superhighway. Make the packets (cars) dumb and able to take marching orders from traffic routing nodes. The obvious problem with that: No self-respecting, freedom-loving American would stand for it.

The last sentence hits the nail on the head too many times. Are we, as Americans, willing to give up the iconic freedom of driving a car in order to arrive at our destination quicker and probably safer? Don’t answer quickly. When I presented this idea with some friends, one them said that he doesn’t want “socialized traffic”. Ouch! But what are we to do about growing traffic issues? I live in Gwinnett County in Georgia. It’s part of the Metro Atlanta Area traffic nightmare. Interstates, major highways, and minor roads are frequently congested much of the day. Although we have a light rail system and buses in MARTA, it’s not nearly enough to dent the traffic problems plaguing this area (light rail has a very limited scope at this time). Expanding the light rail system has initiated county standoffs. And all the new road construction is hindering traffic more and still won’t be enough when completed. And this is the same in many metropolitan and suburban area across the USA. Will we ever have a serious traffic optimization plan in the USA and who will be the brave souls that actually fight for it? I know one thing for certain, the four-headed beast of Obama-Biden-McCain-Palin aren’t those brave souls. Two of them may have to supervise the Great Decession (”Decession” is between depression and recession) in the upcoming term(s).