Traffic jams are caused by keeping the wrong distance between the vehicles, a recently published study in the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) has claimed.
According to the study, if each vehicle on the road maintains an equal distance between the vehicles at the back and in the front, it would allow traffic to move twice as fast.
While equal distance can be easily kept between the vehicles at the front, it can be a challenge to ensure a uniform distance between the vehicles at the back.
To explain how to maintain an equal distance, the study terms the ‘traffic’ as an example of ‘emergent property,’ which can be described as individual objects coming together and forming a more complex system together.
A real-world example of emergent property would be thousands of individual starlings, small to medium-sized sparrow-like birds, flying through the sky in intricately coordinated patterns.
Drawing inspiration from this, whenever driving on the road, instead of only focusing on the vehicles in the front, keeping equal distances between the vehicles both at the front and the back would allow traffic to flow with ease, which is also known as ‘bilateral control.’
Commenting on the study, Berthold Horn, study’s co-author and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, said that human beings lack the capacity to constantly maintain equal distances among vehicles at the front and the back at all times.
However, technology does have this capacity, Horn added, suggesting automakers introduce the feature of adaptive cruise control, an advanced driver-assistance system that automatically adjusts the vehicle speed to maintain a safe distance from vehicles ahead, at the rear of all the vehicles.
