Interesting experiment to recreate traffic jams. Seems like the human factor can never be taken out of this problem! Now we know why these random traffic jams happen. Turns out these human behavioral elements can be normalized out of most traffic information services.
Some quotes from the New Scientist article:
"They asked drivers to cruise steadily at 30 kilometres per hour, and at first the traffic moved freely. But small fluctuations soon appeared in distances between cars, breaking down the free flow, until finally a cluster of several vehicles was forced to stop completely for a moment."
"The shockwave jam travelled backwards through the ring of vehicles at roughly 20 km/h, which is the same as the speed of the shockwave jams observed on roads in real life, says lead researcher Yuki Sugiyama, a physicist in the department of complex systems at Nagoya University."
Thanks to Jonathon Ramsey at Autoblog for finding this.
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