Abstract
Traffic is a problem, and it’s going to get worse. Drivers in Los Angeles can expect to spend about 56 hours a year sitting in jams, while every day traffic jams block around 7,500 km of roads in Europe. In Germany alone in 2012, the year’s total jam length amounted to 450,000 km, equal to the circumference of the Earth plus the distance between Earth and Moon. But that’s mild compared to the situation developing in China, where in the summer of 2010 there was a single jam on the Beijing-Tibet highway stretching for 60 miles and lasting nine days.
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Further Reading
D. Helbing, ‘Traffic and related self-driven many-particle systems’, Rev. Mod. Phys. 73, 1067–1141 (2001).
D. Helbing & M. Treiber, ‘Jams, waves, and clusters’, Science 282, 2001–2003 (1998).
D. Helbing & K. Nagel, ‘The physics of traffic and regional development’, Contemp. Phys. 45, 405–426 (2004).
A. Kesting, M. Treiber, M. Schönhof & D. Helbing, ‘Adaptive cruise control design for active congestion avoidance’, Transport. Res. C 16, 668–683 (2008).
S. Lämmer & D. Helbing, ‘Self-control of traffic lights and vehicle flows in urban road networks’, J. Stat. Mech. P04019 (2008).
B. S. Kerner & H. Rehborn, ‘Experimental properties of phase transitions in traffic flow’, Phys. Rev. Lett. 79, 4030–4033 (1997).
A. Pottmeier, R. Chrobok, S. Hafstein, F. Mazur, M. Schreckenberg, ‘OLSIM: Up-to-date traffic information on the web’, Proc. 3rd IASTED International Conference: Communications, Internet, and Information Technology, November 22–24, 2004, St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands.
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Ball, P. (2012). On the Road: Predicting Traffic. In: Why Society is a Complex Matter. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29000-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29000-8_1
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