Phantom Traffic Jams

A Tech article with Comments posted 27 December 2006.
Tags: car

Apparently I’m not the only person to have contemplated why inexplicable traffic jams occur – you know, the ones that have no apparent cause whatsoever? I had always suspected that it was due to some temporary slowdown which had become amplified, much like turbulence in a pipe of flowing fluid will persist long after the disturbance ends.

The engineer in me asks: Is there anything that can be done to mitigate this problem? Every solution I can think of has one (or more) of these problems:

1. Requires every car to be outfitted with a special hardware
2. Requires special hardware on every major highway
3. Requires the cooperation of every driver

Is it possible that a single driver (you or me) could overcome by some strategy any part of this without cooperation from other drivers? Anyone have a better idea that doesn’t fall prey to the above problems?

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