MIT and UC Berkeley Devise Smarter Ways To Beat Traffic Woes

Cities are cursed with traffic agonies at rush hour. The obvious solution is to avoid hitting the road in that period but that plan doesn't work out every time, does it? So, MIT and UC Berkeley instead focus on keeping a specific group of drivers off the road.

 

[caption id="attachment_44792" align="aligncenter" width="600"]#-Link-Snipped-# San Francisco Bay Area[/caption]

 

This large-scale analysis was achieved by tracking commuters' cellphone and GPS signals rather than survey data. Statistics show that by cutting down the incoming traffic of 1 percent drivers from carefully chosen neighborhoods, the rest of the travelers will save time by almost 18 per cent. The study thus proves that all drivers do not uniformly contribute to the traffic. Hence, a more efficient solution would be to focus on a specific geographic area than to behest all commuters to change their time or route of travel.

This new strategy, though considered efficient by the researchers is yet to get the nod from policy makers.

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