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From: warren@ihnss.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.physics,net.auto
Subject: physical laws of freeway traffic?
Message-ID: <1561@ihnss.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 13-Jun-83 09:11:30 EDT
Article-I.D.: ihnss.1561
Posted: Mon Jun 13 09:11:30 1983
Date-Received: Tue, 14-Jun-83 19:33:21 EDT
Lines: 23

Having spent another wasted hour on the "Tri-state crawlway" over
the weekend, I got to wondering why traffic speeds on overcrowded
freeways tends to oscilate, stopping and accelerating, rather than
maintaining a constant though slower speed.  Such oscillations occur
even when there is no entering or exitting traffic, as is true of
long sections of this particular road.  Given the annoyance of stop
and go driving in a standard shift car, I would presume that at
least some of the people on the road would be trying to damp out the
speed variations.  Is there some physical law that dictates this
behavior, or is it a result of poor driving practices.  Given an
appropriate set of mathematical formulas describing the behavior of
freeway traffic, I wonder if it would be possible to improve the
flow of traffic through bottlenecks by minor modifications of the
roadway.  I have seen a lot of this sort of analysis on traffic
lights, but none on clogged freeways.

Always looking for elegant solutions to real-world problems ...

-- 

	Warren Montgomery
	ihnss!warren
	IH x2494