I have never been good at waiting in line. Put me in a car stuck in traffic, and you will quickly learn why I live in NYC where you can keep your drive time to an absolute minimum. Traffic is definitely one of the rings in my vision of hell.
Until now! The Japanese team got a cluster of vehicles to drive in a circle. As theNew Scientist reports, here’s what happened:
They asked drivers to cruise steadily at 30 kilometres per hour, and at first the traffic moved freely. But small fluctuations soon appeared in distances between cars, breaking down the free flow, until finally a cluster of several vehicles was forced to stop completely for a moment.
That cluster spread backwards through the traffic like a shockwave. Every time a vehicle at the front of the cluster was able to escape at up to 40 km/h, another vehicle joined the back of the jam.
The shockwave jam travelled backwards through the ring of vehicles at roughly 20 km/h, which is the same as the speed of the shockwave jams observed on roads in real life, says lead researcher Yuki Sugiyama, a physicist in the department of complex systems at Nagoya University.
“Although the emerging jam in our experiment is small, its behaviour is not different from large ones on highways,” he told New Scientist.
Check out the video of the experiment. Towards the end, the shockwave becomes deliciously mobile — you can really see it moving backwards.
This also puts me in mind of William Beatty, the electrical engineer who — while stuck in traffic in 1998 — figured out a way to hack traffic jams and erase them.Basically, when he was stuck in a jam, he’d slow down until he had a really large amount of space between him and the car in front of him. Then he moved forward in at very slow, uniform speed, so that he no longer stopped and started. Sure enough, the wave stopped at him: Everyone behind him began driving at a uniform 35 mph. “By driving at the average speed of the traffic around me, my car had been ‘eating’ the traffic waves,” he wrote. The only problem, of course, is that he himself was stuck traveling at the average speed of the wave in front of him, which — at 35 mph — is pretty pokey.
