The Price of Anarchy in Transportation Networks

[I thought this was relevant as it shows that every road does not need to be a car only road in fact it might help to make some roads bike and pedestrian only roads.]

According to an Oct. 6th Bright Green Blog entry, "File this one under 'intensely counterintuitive.' A recent study has found that closing off certain streets can actually relieve traffic congestion. Using Google Maps, a trio of scientists -- Hyejin Youn and Hawoong Jeong, of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Michael Gastner, of the Santa Fe Institute -- looked at traffic routes in Boston, New York, and London. Their paper, titled 'The Price of Anarchy in Transportation Networks: Efficiency and Optimality Control' and published in the journal Physical Letters, found that, when individual drivers seek the quickest route, they sometimes end up slowing things down for everybody.

"It all hinges on something called Braess's Paradox (and yes, I appreciate the irony of a Wikipedia entry that challenges the wisdom of crowds), which states that adding capacity to a network in which all the moving entities rationally seek the most efficient route can sometimes reduce the network's overall efficiency. The authors give a simple example of how this could play out: Imagine two routes to a destination, a short but narrow bridge and a longer but wider highway. Let's also imagine that the combined travel times of all the drivers is shortest if half take the bridge and half take the highway. But because each driver is selfishly trying to seek the shortest route for himself, this doesn't happen..."


Source: <a href="http://tinyurl.com/47hg76">http://tinyurl.com/47hg76</a>;
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Title: &quot;Does closing roads cut delays?&quot;
Author: Eoin O'Carroll

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