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| Alternative routes help us to reduce heavy traffic (http://www.rtd-fastracks.com) |
Take the long way home. It seems that commutes to and from city centres would be better if a few drivers took the scenic route. Most drivers in urban areas try to find the fastest possible route to their destination. However, when everyone does this, congestion increases and everyone suffers. If a handful of people took longer routes, they could cut overall congestion by 30 per cent, according to a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
The crowd of a road is affected by certain things, including the population of four-wheel vehicles or more than four-wheel. The additional of different vehicles makes a very big difference. Given that the removal of a couple of cars from during the rush hours, or morning commute could have saved a lot of time for the society.
To perform that, Serdar Colak and Marta Gonzalez, both of them are researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, looked at millions of anonymous location-tagged mobile-phone records and matched them to roads in Boston, the San Francisco Bay area, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, and Lisbon and Port in Portugal. They noted that when drivers choose the shortest routes for themselves, commute times can lengthen by 60 per cent. Apps that suggest the shortest routes in real time make the problem even worse.
But if a few cars take side roads, congestion reduces, saving each driver up 3 minutes on average. In the future, computers and smart cars could figure out the best way to send everyone, the authors add. Apps that suggest other routes could offer drivers incentives such as a free cup of coffee for sacrificing their time.
Unfortunately, not everyone is convinced that this is the best solution. The real success is not reduce the traffic, but how to invite the individuals leave their car at home and choose public transportation.