Off Topic: Estimating the Occurence of Phantom Traffic Jams

July 8, 2010 · Filed Under Thoughts  - 2 Comment(s)

Estimating the slowdown on the freeway.  Interesting article from Wired quantifies and estimates the occurrence of phantom traffic jams.    You all know them… traffic slows to a crawl.  There must be an accident.  But no, it is just a phantom traffic jam.  Living in Los Angeles I find this really interesting.


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Comments

2 Responses to “Off Topic: Estimating the Occurence of Phantom Traffic Jams”

  1. Lee Fischman on July 9th, 2010 9:28 am

    Mike Kimel (Galorath alumni) and I used to have a repeated argument over the source of phantom jams, i.e., those occurring without the presence of an accident. He would b*tch at drivers pressing on their brakes, while I figured the cause was analogous to the turbulence induced in fluids flowing through a pipe. Turns out we were both right – how do you get turbulence without perturbation? We all await automated highway navigation…

  2. Denton on July 9th, 2010 9:51 am

    Dan, I appreciate your comments regarding traffic jams which seem to occur for no particular reason. I have a theory. In the same way that a large % of drivers are “slow” to start moving when a stop light turns green I believe that those drivers are also “slow” to respond when traffic begins to move which just propagates the sluggishness.

    I have always proposed to others that I believe that traffic on LA freeways follows a “traveling wave theory”. I believe the slow down causes a traffic “plug” or heavy concentration of vehicles. And that Jam moves down the freeway as a traveling wave. I have always wanted an opportunity to look at the traffic jam from the air so I could see if it did not actually move down the freeway. I wonder if it would obey the mathematical laws of partial differential equations when we studied traveling waves. I can still have nightmares thinking of trying to write the equations of motion for the wave traveling in a guitar string that in one case was fastened at only one end and a different case where is was not fastened at either end and when plucked how would it vibrate.

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