Phantom Traffic Jams

Reported May 2010

BOSTON, Mass. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Accidents and weather conditions are often to blame for heavy traffic, but many times there is no apparent reason for the delays. Small disturbances like hitting the brakes too hard or tailgating can lead to phantom traffic jams, but now mathematicians are using their skills to try to understand and solve the problem.

They're called phantom traffic jams -- highway congestion that appears for no apparent reason. But now a team of mathematicians is trying to get to the root of the problem.

Jean Christophe Nave, Ph.D, a mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Boston, is part of a team that discovered the mathematics behind these phantom jams is strikingly similar to the fluid mechanics equations that explain the waves created during an explosion. By applying this information to a circular road way model, researchers realized driver error is not always the culprit.

"You could put robots or computers driving those cars and you would still see those traffic jams," Dr. Nave told Ivanhoe.

Traffic speed and how many cars are on the road, or density, are used to calculate the conditions of these jams. Understanding how they form could someday help design better roadways.

"The second part of it is to explain what we have now and try to advocate solutions such as to put speed sensors on the road," Dr. Nave said.

The sensors could someday alert commuters to the speed limits on specific stretches of the road to keep the traffic flowing and to get you where you're going on time.

The mathematical model can also help determine safe speed limits and identify stretches of road where accidents are most likely to happen.

The American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America, The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, and the Division of Fluid Dynamics - American Physical Society contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Jean-Christophe Nave
Postdoctoral Associate
Dept of Mathematics
(617) 253-4989
jcnave@mit.edu

Mike Breen and Annette Emerson
American Mathematical Society
Providence, RI 02904-2294
(800) 321-4267
http://www.ams.org
paoffice@ams.org

Ivars Peterson
Mathematical Association of America,
Washington, DC 20036-1358
(800) 741-9415
http://www.maa.org
ipeterson@maa.org

Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
Barry List
(443) 757-3560
http://www.informs.org
barry.list@informs.org

Lois Smith
Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
Santa Monica, CA 90406
(310) 394-1811
http://www.hfes.org
lois@hfes.org

Division of Fluid Dynamics - American
Physical Society
Dr. James Brasseur
The Pennsylvania State University
(814) 865-3159
brasseur@psu.edu

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