Shockwave Traffic Jam

Read an interesting article on newScientistTech about a first time real-life simulation of a phenomenon called "Shockwave traffic jam".

You may wonder what is "Shockwave traffic jam"? You know, those annoying traffic jams that occur for no apparent reason when you are on the road driving. The road does not really have heavy traffic and most cars seem to be going smoothly, but all of a sudden a traffic jam will happen out of not where.... And you wonder why....

This is why - A team of Japanese researchers recreated this kind of seemingly-unnecessary traffic jam with 22 cars in a circular test-track based on the "shockwave" mathematical theory.



From the video, you can see that usually this type of traffic jams are caused by human errors. Every time when a single driver, due to whatever reason, slows down, may be just a bit, then his small deceleration will ripple through to the cars in the back in growing magnitude. The ones that are immediately behind must slow down more and more. The ones that are further back might even need to come to a complete stop, causing a shockwave jam of vehicles.

I was really interested in the study and amazed by the video (Hurrah to the creative Japanese scientists!!). I replayed the video many times to observe the shockwave phenomenon, its cause and effect. So glad that I don''t need to suffer from that anymore (well... at least not for another long while). ^_~