Can Autonomous Vehicles Avoid Traffic Jams?
Have you ever been at a stoplight and wondered why it takes an eternity to start moving after the light turns green? Well it turns out that drivers are not perfect (I didn’t have to tell you that). But what you might not have known is that due to human drivers being imperfect, traffic jams can be created for no apparent reason. In an experiment, researchers had between drivers driving in a circle at a target speed. Once they drove for a few minutes, something surprising happened: traffic jams magically appeared and disappeared spontaneously! This is known as a ‘phantom traffic jam,’ and appears in many models of traffic flow, but had never been seen experimentally.
The lines in the plot above are vehicle trajectories, known as a space-time plot. Each line is a particular vehicle and the wavy parts denote where traffic shockwaves occur. The waves are moving down to the right showing that when a vehicle suddenly stops, the one behind stops and so on and so forth, creating a traffic wave.
Inspired by observations of traffic waves appearing for no apparent reason, a group at MIT came up with the idea that traffic jam waves arise due to local driver disturbances (one or more drivers…
