In rush-hour traffic, a single driver blocking the box can ruin everyone’s afternoon. But when you’re sitting on a backed-up road, cars stretching into the distance, the source of the gridlock is more of a mystery: Where’s the problem coming from?
What’s true at a single intersection turns out to apply on a larger scale: It’s just a few drivers, relatively speaking, who jam things up for the rest of us.
That’s the conclusion of a team of engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, who have produced one of the most detailed maps of urban traffic patterns ever constructed. They did it by analyzing the cellphone records of 680,000 Boston-area commuters (they perform a similar analysis for the Bay Area). The call logs—which identify the towers used to transmit calls—allowed the researchers to trace each individual’s commute, anonymously, from origin to destination.
Read the rest of the story at the Boston Globe.
No comments:
Post a Comment