The municipal election has got me thinking about traffic. People talk about traffic all the time, but it comes to the fore during elections. We talk about transit, road maintenance, taxis, and bicycles, and argue about what to do about all of them. Traffic usually refers to cars, but it’s polysemic, like most English words, which means it has more than one meaning: illicit trade, for instance, or views of a web page. Even pedestrians are foot traffic.

You aren’t stuck in traffic. You ARE traffic.

When we’re talking about roadways, many of us compare traffic to a fluid. For example, if the pressure in a pipe is too high (congestion), you can put in a bigger pipe (more lanes) to reduce the pressure. Intuitively, this makes sense: if there are too many cars for two lanes, they’ll spread out if you add another. This would make sense if traffic behaved like a fluid or a gas, but it doesn’t. It’s organic: it’s people moving people and stuff around. Like any organism, it expands to fill all available space in the ecosystem.

The expansion in traffic when new or wider roads are built is a result of two things. One is generated traffic, which seems to me like a misnomer, because the traffic isn’t generated, it’s diverted from other paths. Build a bigger, smoother, faster road, and traffic is drawn from other smaller, rougher, slower roads. The other cause for expanded traffic is induced demand or induced traffic: new traffic generated by the ease of travel. Build a big highway and more people travel because it’s easier to go somewhere. The costs — time, effort, money — have shrunk.

As for web traffic, much of the same things we did for cars are happening anyway, without being managed. Bandwidth is increasing, costs are dropping, computing power is increasing and becoming increasingly portable. The highways are being built, leading to a lot of induced traffic. It’s easier to be and to do more online, so more of us are online, doing stuff.

The thing is, traffic isn’t necessarily bad. Certainly, auto congestion is bad — wasteful, time consuming, and dirty — but it’s also good. For one thing, it’s a good indicator of economic health. If people are driving, it’s likely because they’re working, buying, or selling something. And even if they’re not, traffic is good for the economy: people are buying cars, gas, coffee, floor mats, and service such as car repairs or insurance, and receiving advertising on their car radios and from billboards. Arguments about whether this is a good economy aside, traffic is good for the economy.

But traffic isn’t bad. Foot traffic, is by all accounts, good. So is website traffic. In French, traffic is circulation, which has far fewer negative connotations. (Also, their descriptions of other car-related things are much more poetic: a traffic jam is a cork or a throttling, you aren’t sideswiped, you’re hit by a shark’s tail; even the rear-view mirror is rétroviseur.) I think our failures in managing car traffic can be used as lessons in generating other forms of traffic.

We can also attract traffic where we want it by building new corridors and boosting infrastructure. These are things that will increase generated traffic, but especially induced (new) traffic.

Maybe “information superhighway” wasn’t such a crummy metaphor after all.

Virtually, we can attract users (an aside: the French word is internaut(e), which is vastly superior to “user,” in my humble opinion) by improving the user experience. Improving the user experience is a focus at rtraction (and I hope it is in most shops), and it’s a good way to draw traffic or to maximise the traffic you draw.

Are there ways to turn useless traffic into useful traffic? Yep. If someone lands on your site accidentally, are there ways to engage them and keep them? Of course. It’s user experience, which is something that I hadn’t considered consciously much before I started at rtraction. A positive user experience is doubly useful: attracting new internauts (induced traffic) and forming a relationship with those who arrive (generated traffic), just as we saw with the construction of interstates and the 400-series highways. Bonus: a positive user experience is far easier to build than new bandwidth or a bigger network, and it’s less susceptible to throttling by corporate interests.

Web traffic management doesn’t have to be the kludge that the road system has become. It’s still (relatively) early, and if we’re smart, we can prevent corks and avoid being hit by a shark’s tail. We can plan, we forecast, and we direct traffic sensibly. We can start now, by making our own webspace a pleasant space, but we really need to think ahead. How will our infrastructure grow, and what will grow out of it? How will the decisions we make now shape our future? Our real-world traffic management system has left us with air, water, and visual pollution, and has contributed to the decline of urban cores, the rise in obesity, and one-hour commutes. Do we want to leave the same sort of mess behind that our ancestors did?