{"id":318,"date":"2008-08-03T10:16:19","date_gmt":"2008-08-03T14:16:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=318"},"modified":"2008-08-03T10:16:19","modified_gmt":"2008-08-03T14:16:19","slug":"traffic-behavior-and-operations-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2008\/08\/03\/traffic-behavior-and-operations-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Traffic Behavior and Operations Research"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"merging\"The New York Times Magazine has an article today entitled “The Urge to Merge<\/a>” on how people handle tunnels, construction, and so on, when driving, where the number of lanes decreases. Some people, the lineuppers, carefully get into one of the continuing lanes and wait patiently to go through the tunnel. Others, the sidezoomers, zip along one of the ending lanes until the last minute, and then force themselves into the lane. Of course, whether they can merge in depends on the mood and attention of the lineupper involved. All this leads to aggravation and, worse, inefficiency, since the constant stop-and-go allows less traffic to flow through than a smoothly flowing system.<\/p>\n

When I lived in Germany, traffic patterns were noticeably more organized (as was much of life). There, cars all go up to the merge point, at which point the cars alternated in the use of the lane. This “zipper” effect could be done at reasonably high speed, since there was never any question on whose turn it was. The only worry was some silly American messing up their system (at which point I got to learn lots of German words that were not taught in my classes). This is a great example of the value of coordination. Almost any solution where people each know what the others will do is better than uncertainty.<\/p>\n

My only complaint about the article came in the following part:<\/p>\n

So I started consulting professionals on my own: traffic engineers, the highway police, queuing theorists. The learning curve, it must be said, was robust. I hadn\u2019t known queuing had theories. But of course it does, mathematicians and business-operations people have to work them out, the heart-attack patient gets in ahead of the sprained ankle and nobody has a problem with that, and anybody who has been to Europe intuitively understands what one engineer meant when in midsentence he said to me, \u201cperfect England,\u201d meaning culturally mandated compulsive queuing, and, \u201cperfect Italy,\u201d meaning culturally mandated compulsive nonqueuing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Operations Research, dammit, Operations Research!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times Magazine has an article today entitled “The Urge to Merge” on how people handle tunnels, construction, and so on, when driving, where the number of lanes decreases. Some people, the lineuppers, carefully get into one of the continuing lanes and wait patiently to go through the tunnel. Others, the sidezoomers, zip … Continue reading “Traffic Behavior and Operations Research”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-or-in-the-press"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}