Data on Beijing Cabs Reveals the Cause of Traffic Jams

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/38679/

by Anon84 • 15 years ago

35 28 15 years ago

Goladus3• 15 years ago

"I think this is an interesting direction, though I wonder to what extent the real problem in urban planning is not having the resources—money—to do anything about it," says Sam Madden, an associate professor at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory who studies wireless sensor networks, including GPS units.

Resources-- and political will. It doesn't matter what your data shows if the residents won't let you build roads through their neighborhoods. In Cambridge, MA there are roads that actually already exist but rush hour traffic is deliberately blocked from using them. (eg Whitemore ave / Seagrave Road between Alewife Brook Parkway and Mass Ave)

PakG12• 15 years ago

It's like that thread about the guy who ran simulations to figure out the optimal way to board planes. Even if it's true, not gonna happen, 1st class pay partly for the right to board first. Exactly the same type of situation.

dspillett• 15 years ago

First class can still board before the rest of us in steerage in that case though.

First class on in what-ever order is most efficient for that part of the cabin, then the rest on in what-ever order is best for those areas.

Though what would really happen would be "first class on in what-ever order they fight for amongst themselves because they all consider themselves too important to listen to instructions from the boarding staff" followed by "the rest on in what-ever order they fight out as they don't care about the common good if that means they are on 12th instead of 1st".

ryanlchan• 15 years ago

Sometimes it takes a bold move in order to convince your customers about change. See: news feed, box wine, and nearly every apple product.

In fact, I've never figured out why first class has to board first. When I rode on Cathay Pacific on business, the attendants come get you from the traveler's lounge last, once everyone else has boarded. You don't need to jockey for overhead luggage space, so why wait longer in the cramped confines of the cabin? I wish more airlines did that.

jinushaun• 15 years ago

I was looking for a conclusion, but couldn't seem to find it. Anyone? The closest thing I can find is that going from A to C clogs up B, so city planners should create a direct A to C route.

astine• 15 years ago

The clever bit is that they are using taxi routes to predict traffic patterns rather than just looking at where the traffic jams happen. They've demonstrated that creating direct routes which correspond to taxi routes does much to alleviate congestion.

atmz• 15 years ago

The research itself could be interesting, but the article is terribly written and ridiculously dumbed down; I imagine the interesting parts have to do with the identification and partitioning of areas and routes. Shame about the article.

GiraffeNecktie• 15 years ago

The construction of bigger roads is the CAUSE of traffic jams, not the solution. The more you improve a highway system, the more people build and relocate to take advantage of the highway. But you can never upgrade the rest of the city streets to absorb all the cars spilling off the highway. The only solution is to invest in mass transit and vigorously control suburban sprawl (by increasing population density, making downtown living more attractive, and restricting new development anywhere within driving distance).

ars5• 15 years ago

That's not a solution, that's giving up and saying "we won't let you live there".

My experience is the opposite anyway - the more sprawl the less traffic. Very congested areas with tons of people were always horrible places to live, never a place to park, and it takes forever to get anywhere. (And please don't tell me your "solution" to that is making it so people don't want to go anywhere because it's too much trouble.)

Putting underground subways like some cities have is simply unfeasible in most places. Buses are just too slow in congested areas.

barrkel2• 15 years ago

If you're living in a very densely populated area and you "never have a place to park", you're doing it wrong.

(To be clear: what are you parking? The whole point of a densely populated area is that you don't need a vehicle.)

PakG12• 15 years ago

Sprawl works well to reduce traffic only if the sprawl develops well enough so there's no real reason for people to travel between regions regularly. Otherwise, it'll most definitely increase traffic. Why wouldn't it? Increasingly large population spread over an increasingly large area, with all the traffic only going in a few specific directions.

gcv• 15 years ago

Sprawl reduces traffic only along the leaves of the commuting graph: few people live there, and no one commutes through the leaves to reach inner hubs. When a node stops being a leaf, more and more vehicles travel through it, which means increased congestion. It also means that people living on leaf nodes but who work in the hubs have to travel farther and farther, along more invreasingly congested nodes, than they do in their own remote neighborhoods.

This is certainly the case in areas like New York (whose suburbs grew largely because Robert Moses liked cars more than trains, although he himself did not even drive) and San Francisco (which has a unique bi-directional commute traffic jam problem, where both the city and far-flung suburban sprawl nodes are job hubs). I don't have a link handy, but I believe the growth of Atlanta followed this exact pattern and became a classic case study of awful urban planning.

Jun8• 15 years ago

This sounds counterintuitive but is absolutely true. I know that London instituted a "tax" on all vehicles entering the downtown area, which helped greatly with the congestion. When I was visiting Munich I also saw that some roads were deliberately narrowed to discourage people driving.

The infrastructure increase can never match the increase in number of vehicles. One can conjecture a modified version of Peter Principle: (Unless drastic measures are taken) traffic density will always increase to the level of congestion. Or think about the fact that regardless of how big your hard disk is, the rate it's being filled is generally constant.

So, bigger roads doesn't make too much sense (there are also arguments from landscape beauty, i.e. remember how they demolished the Beijing Old Town for easier access, more roads mean more of that.)

patrickgzill• 15 years ago

I wonder if the gridded road construction of Manhattan, with almost all roads about the same size, (save the Avenues), is a solution. Instead of a few big roads, build many smaller roads, which will then allow for efficient travel to many places.

T-hawk• 15 years ago

The problem here is that the number of intersections scales quadratically, as the square of the number of roads. Each intersection cuts the capacity of the roads and represents a potential cause of gridlock and accidents.

JoeAltmaier• 15 years ago

Combine with OnStar's ubiquitous capture of private car driving, and maybe we already have the data in America?

stanleydrew• 15 years ago

Single page printable version:

http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.asp...

ohashi• 15 years ago

Speaking of cabs in Beijing: how come I can never get one? I see empty cabs drive by constantly (and not just foreigners, locals too). Or they sit around not wanting to pickup fares. The whole cab system seemed broken when they didn't want to drive people places. Anyone have any idea what sort of incentive system these guys have or try and explain this behavior?

malandrew• 15 years ago

The problem in Beijing is painfully obvious if you've ever experienced the traffic jams there. The main cause of the jams other than cars is badly designed on-ramps and off-ramps onto the ring roads.

Beijing has a very unique on-ramp/off-ramp solution that I have yet to encounter in any other city. When they were first designed and put into use they made a lot of sense. A friend of mine who has lived in the city since 1999, said that back in the day there were almost no cars on the road and huge avenues. The on-ramps and off-ramps were designed and put into place at around this time.

The problem with the ramps is the the on-ramp leads onto the ring road and about 100m later there is an off-ramp. Once the traffic gets really bad the exiting traffic blocks the flow of the entering traffic. Once that happens the entire city comes to a stop because this on-ramp/off-ramp problem cascades throughout the city and everywhere becomes blocked.

enf• 15 years ago

That sounds like a cloverleaf interchange... Once a very popular choice to build because it only requires building one bridge, now less common because of that problem and because they use land very inefficiently.

jahmed• 15 years ago

Traffic is the result of incorrect pricing. Its cheap to drive relative to the alternatives taking into account all non-tangible benefits like privacy and comfort or the lack of a schedule and predefined route. If it is more expensive to drive people will drive less. You can use good pricing to influence behavior. If you charged everyone getting on an Los Angeles metro area freeway $5 between 7-9am and 2-5pm Monday-Friday some people wouldnt use the freeways. Yes now they are tollways but they are already tollways only funded through taxes. Really this wouldnt be a great idea because most people will just drive on the streets resulting in a shift in traffic but probably not a significant decline in total traffic. To be more effective this need to be combined with a robust mass transit network. When gasoline prices spiked in California people started driving less but overall there wasnt a significant change in demand mainly because of the lack of viable substitute.

What needs to happen is a combined approach of dynamic pricing of driving and public transit along with investment in the transportation system as a system and good urban planning. Without a combined approach problems appear intractable but only because the incentives just are misaligned.

Data on Beijing Cabs Reveals the Cause of Traffic Jams

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