Random Thoughts of Chris Tilley

This is a cool video I saw on Daily Planet this afternoon. It a very good illustration of how traffic slowdowns can occur when there appears to be no reason. All it takes is one car slowing a bit which triggers a chain reaction. Even on this very simple scenario with only 22 car on a circle without any other factors, traffic came to a compete stop.

Now consider your modern city with a huge number more cars traveling at a wider variety speeds, traffic lights, bottlenecks, merging traffic and a thousand other variables. Its no wonder that we have traffic jams.

I wonder how much gas we could save a CO2 emissions we could avoid if traffic flowed perfectly. Ok, perfectly is not very realistic but there is certainly room for improvement. In Portland Oregon The Climate Trust has a carbon offset project to optimize the traffic lights on 17 major arteries. They are expecting 171,786 metric tons carbon dioxide over the five year project lifetime.

Considering we will never get everyone on to mass transit even though that will have a major effect we will see more projects like this one.