When I’m driving, I often think about my circle of trafficular* influence. If I make a decision to change lanes on a highway, for instance, how far would you have to go before my decision would not influence even the slightest change in traffic patterns? Clearly, the cars immediately surrounding me would have to modify their behavior, and likewise the cars immediately around those cars. Our highway systems is extremely interconnected, could my decision to change lanes ultimately result in the slight modification in traffic somewhere very far away?
Of course, the larger the decision the bigger the impact. If I snake through traffic and cause three accidents, those accidents will likely have a substantial circle of influence. I wonder if anyone’s done computer simulations to test this… or if it’s even possible to test.
Either way, I think it’s a fun concept to think about.
*NICE.
Mike D changes lanes in New Haven, causing a Hurricane in Hong Kong!
ha ha!
Well there’s traffic waves, where you can single handedly destroy a traffic jam:
http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/amateur/traffic/traffic1.html
“In driving with huge empty spaces during rush hour, I find that the space ahead of me doesn’t just instantly fill up. Other drivers don’t change lanes to fill them.”
That guy has obviously never seen Boston traffic…
When I took a mass transfer class at WPI, we had basically that same exact question as a an exam question. It was a really complicated problem involving fluxes of cars, variable speeds, inter=car forces/attractions, etc. But it was neat because the theory somewhat held true if you thought of cars as individual molecules in a gas stream.
YES!
I was just thinking about this guy!
And yes, it works in Boston too.
My favorite is the simulation of traffic shockwaves by some japanese scienticians.
Whenever I left spaces commuting in on i-90 and i-95 they were filled as soon as the space was large enough for some other car to fit.