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From: paulsc@tekecs.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.physics,net.auto
Subject: Re: physical laws of freeway traffic?
Message-ID: <1401@tekecs.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 14-Jun-83 11:47:03 EDT
Article-I.D.: tekecs.1401
Posted: Tue Jun 14 11:47:03 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 16-Jun-83 01:11:23 EDT
Lines: 36

You might be interested in reading:
	Herman, Robert, and Keith Gardels. "Vehicular Traffic Flow."
	Scientific American, pp. 35-43, December 1963.

	or
	Wetherell, Charles. "Etudes for Programmers."
	Prentice-Hall Inc. 1978, pp. 64-66.

Actually the Scientific American article is the reference in the
Etudes for Programmers chapter. The idea that "if everybody
drives more slowly, everybody gets home sooner" [Wetherell78] is
an interesting concept. Of course everybody doesn't refer to
each individual person, but to everyone put together (i.e. the
average). The idea is that traffic flow has some of the same
properties as (nearly?) incompressible fluid flow. (At least I
don't think of my car as being very compressible.) The
Scientific American article shows results from experiments
performed in New York using real people in real traffic. I
thought it was interesting enough that I performed a computer
simulation for a project for a simulation course I took. (I got
the idea from the Wetherell book.) The shockwaves set up by one
slow driver, or one stall propogate and dissipate very slowly on
a busy highway. The busier the highway the more slowly things
clear up.

Paul H. Scherf
P. O. Box 1000
Del. Sta. 61-201
Tektronix Engineering Computing Systems
Wilsonville, Oregon, USA

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