America has a passengership problem. That’s another way of saying that too many people drive to and from work each day in otherwise empty cars. But if you think of the problem not as one of lonely drivers but of missing passengers, solutions to traffic congestion and auto pollution start to look slightly different. The answer isn’t necessarily that we need to get all those single drivers onto mass transit, or even that we need to build more transit. Maybe we just need to get more people to take a ride in someone else’s back seat. All this currently unused occupancy – no ... Read More
Can China Avoid Getting Stuck in Traffic?
February 6, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The new Great Wall of China is the "Great Wall" of cars stuck in city traffic, researchers say, and it will take more than restrictions on new license plates and car registrations to break the gridlock. The problem is, there's barely enough space on the roads in China's largest cities for the 35 million cars that were bought during the past decade of frenzied consumerism, according to transportation experts at the University of California, Berkeley, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the ancient capital city of Xi'an, home of the buried armies of terracotta warriors, Lee ... Read More
The Yellow Light Conundrum
June 10, 2010 • By • 3 Comments
Even before attending a driver's education class, most would-be drivers know how traffic signals work: green means go, red means stop and yellow means slow down. Or does it? Real-world experience suggests that for many drivers, yellow is a cue to speed up, an indication that if you want to make it through the intersection, you'd better gun it. What dictates whether a driver hits the brakes at a yellow light or races through it? A new study by University of Cincinnati doctoral student Zhixia Li identifies factors influencing the split-second decision that follows what he refers to as ... Read More
Making the Case for Carpool Lanes
March 4, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
Do carpool lanes reduce traffic, or are they a waste of space — space that would be more efficiently used if it were accessible to all drivers and not just the ones who are carpooling, driving hybrids or riding motorcycles? There are plenty of commuters arguing for and against carpool lanes, and now both sides have research to back up their arguments. An earlier Miller-McCune.com article suggested that four general-purpose lanes on a freeway carry more people and vehicles per hour and than a freeway with one high-occupancy vehicle (HOV), or carpool, lane and three unrestricted lanes. The ... Read More
Changing Lanes
March 18, 2008 • By • 2 Comments
Next time you’re in the carpool lane, breezing past lines of traffic crawling along to your right, you might just want to hold that smirk of satisfaction: The advantages of the high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) system may be much more modest than you think. That’s according to a recently published study by Jaimyoung Kwon, from the Department of Statistics, California State University, East Bay, and Professor Pravin Varaiya, at the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering. They collected peak-hour traffic data at more than 700 points along California’s ... Read More
Braking Up Is Easy to Do (In Traffic)
March 4, 2008 • By • 1 Comment
All traffic jams are annoying, but particularly frustrating are those that occur for no apparent reason — the ones that make you crawl along for miles, expecting to find a blocked lane. Instead, the traffic simply frees up, and you speed on your way, fuming about lost minutes and wondering what that was all about. Mathematicians at the University of Exeter have created a model that finally explains what is going on. They discovered that when a driver slows down suddenly — say, in response to a truck unexpectedly pulling into his or her lane — the driver of the car directly behind him ... Read More
