Fwd: [Dewayne-Net] Math Says You're Driving Wrong and It's Slowing Us All Down

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

I was happier webs in the early 60s one of my colleagues essentially
discovered the same thing and published it in scientific American and it
was implemented by the Port authority of New York and Many highways. It was
designed to Equally space cars . It was based on math.

Why is this different?

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Tue, Jan 2, 2018 at 4:41 AM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Math Says You're Driving Wrong and It's Slowing Us
All Down
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


[Note:  This item comes from friend David Rosenthal.  DLH]

Math Says You're Driving Wrong and It's Slowing Us All Down
The math says that if you and everyone else on the road kept an equal
distance between the cars ahead and behind, traffic would move twice as
quickly.
By MATT SIMON
Dec 14 2017
<
https://www.wired.com/story/math-says-youre-driving-wrong-and-its-slowing-us-all-down/
>

Ah, the phantom traffic jam. You know, that thing where the flow suddenly
slows to a halt and you inch forward for a half hour and then things pick
up again and you look around for an accident or construction or anything at
all for Pete’s sake that might justify the time you just wasted. But no,
nothing. It's as if the fates chose this particular time and place to screw
with you.

The question is, why? People tailgating and bunching up, maybe. But a new
study in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems
mathematically models the implications of the larger problem: You’re not
keeping the right distance from the car behind you.

That may seem counterintuitive, since you don't have much control over how
far you are from the car behind you—especially when that person is a
tailgater. But the math says that if everyone kept an equal distance
between the cars ahead and behind, all spaced out in a more orderly
fashion, traffic would move almost twice as quickly. Now sure, you're
probably not going to convince everyone on the road to do that. Still, the
finding could be a simple yet powerful way to optimize semi-autonomous cars
long before the fully self-driving car of tomorrow arrives.

Traffic is perhaps the world’s most infuriating example of what’s known as
an emergent property. Meaning, lots of individual things forming together
to create something more complex. Emergent properties are usually quite
astounding. You’ve probably seen video of starlings forming a murmuration,
a great shifting blob of thousands upon thousands of birds.

Bats flying en masse out of a cave is another example, swarming sometimes
by the millions through a small exit. And scientists are just beginning to
understand how they do so. “The assumption is that they're actually aware
of bats all around them, not just in front, and that's why hundreds of
thousands of them can come out of a very narrow cave and not collide,” says
study co-author Berthold Horn of MIT. Keep in mind that bats not only
echolocate to build a map of their surroundings, but can usually see pretty
well too.

When you’re driving down the highway, such grace eludes you. You’re locked
onto the car ahead of you, and rightfully so—that’s the agent most likely
to ruin your day if it suddenly stops. But optimally you’d be keeping an
equal distance between yourself and that car, and yourself and the car
behind you. This is known as bilateral control.

“This is what happens when you have a control system that is simply trying
to keep up with the vehicle in front," says Horn. "And its job is not to
make the world better, to have hundreds of cars moving in unison. It's very
myopic.” Copy-paste this inefficiency across the highway and you start to
create an emergent property of misery. And really, you shouldn’t blame
yourself. A human behind the wheel simply doesn’t have the capacity to
constantly calculate both the distance forward and the distance back.

[snip]

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