What Causes Traffic Jams?

Living in Atlanta and other large cities can cause a lot of frustration on those days when traffic is particularly slow for whatever reason. Last year, for example, Atlanta (home of EasyAutoSales.com) was rated the sixth worst city in the US for traffic by Forbes Magazine. I, personally, have lived in both Chicago and Washington D.C. (two very traffic heavy cities) and have traveled most of the East coast. In my experience, Atlanta traffic is worse than any city I’ve been to. To combat these traffic issues, many cities like New York City, New York and London, England have or plan to institute congestion charges and hope to alleviate some of the traffic woes by a combination of fewer cars coming into the city and congestion charge money to improve road infrastructure. However, sometimes traffic volume isn’t the problem. Often times rain brings out poor driving. Other times, automobile accidents or road construction that lead to traffic issues. However, despite the fact that many cite the roads and road conditions as major parts in determining the speed of traffic, we often overlook the human element.I recently came across a video that displays the results of human drivers who were asked to drive ~30 KPH on a closed loop with 21 other drivers. A time lapsed version of the video shows that without any provocation, the distances  drivers keep from the cars around them tend to fluctuate to such a great degree that eventually a “rubber neck” effect occurs that seems to propagate as a wave throughout the closed loop. The video can be seen below:

Most of the time I, as well as many others, attribute traffic jams to accidents, police cars and other active situations that occur on the road and disturb the physical flow of traffic (eg. blocked lanes). Other times we see traffic lights that prevent enough cars from passing through an intersection and a slow buildup that leads to even slower traffic. The above video proves that there is a strong psychological component to traffic jams that is beyond the laws and rules of the road.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 12:21 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.