The Science of Traffic

I found a new route to get to work this morning. I finally decided to break the comfort of habit and find a new way to get to I-5 N. See, when I first moved here, I stayed in temporary housing a few blocks south of where I live now. From there, it was pretty simple to go up University until I ran into the I-5 N ramp. Since then, I've been driving through downtown traffic to get to the same ramp. Definitely not efficient, but it was what I knew and it was habit.

So breaking habits is always interesting, but it really paid off. I found a new way to go and it goes through an interesting neighborhood. Oh yeah, and it also saves me so much time.
Note: I used Google Maps on this link because I actually prefer their route to Bing's. I feel guilty/dirty. C'est la vie. I get to work all the same.

On the drive this morning, there was a line of cars on the side of the road in the opposite lane that had apparently been in the same accident. The first thing I thought was "I hope it wasn't impressive enough that people feel the need to look."

There are way too many times when I'm driving here where traffic crawls along until we pass an accident and then people drive normally again. I wonder if police and wrecker crews would be helping traffic along by putting up tarps or something so people wouldn't have anything to stare at when they drove.

I spend a lot of time in traffic. I spend a lot of time thinking about the science of traffic. It seems like a math problem almost. The road has some measure of capacity or bandwidth, and then there is the actual throughput which is present and it's far less. So what goes into the degredation? There are things like human response times, distractions, selfishness, anger, unwillingness to merge or let people merge, bends in the road, and all kinds of reasons to slam on the breaks and ruin everybody's commute. There are just so many variables and human psychology and physics and random factors that must contribute to the reason I spend an hour driving home in the evening and only 30 minutes in the morning. I like to think about the people at the front of the traffic jam and wonder what they're doing to back things up. It's like a whiplash effect where a small action up front translates to major jam-ups miles back.

It got me thinking that traffic is really an interesting problem, and I have more respect for the people that engineer those kinds of things. That being said, I'd still encourage an improvement, but I'd be interested to find out if there is any kind of literature or publications out there about traffic. It seems fascinating to me. But maybe that's just because I sit in traffic too much.

If there is one thing I can say about my commute here is that it is still stunningly beautiful. I hope I never tire of it. From the Seattle skyline, to the grey sheet of water over Lake Washington, to the engulfing trees and mountains as I get closer to Redmond, I find myself able to tolerate the traffic because it gives me more time to take it all in.

Still, somebody needs to invent robot drivers. It would be awesome.