Traffic Waves
Thanks to Matt Pennig for pointing me at Wikipedia’s entry on Traffic Waves. I first started thinking about this while reading “The Goal”, a management book. There was a chapter where the author wondered why all the machines in a factory could never achieve maximum throughput no matter how carefully they were balanced. This notion of small variances causing big results is exactly behind those stop-and-go-for-no-reason jams we see on the roads.
Here’s a corroborating experiment:
Interestingly, a Seattle driver has arrived at the same conclusion, and has thoughts on how to be an un-jammer:
Ah, Wikipedia. Is there anything you don’t know?