ROFL. Aggression = No congestion

[admiral_ju00]

Very interesting, study.

 

Bold motorists clear roads

 

Computer model explains Bogotá's jam-free streets.

 

Aggression is the key to relieving tension on Bogotá's streets.

 

Aggressive driving can ease traffic congestion, say researchers who have created a computer model of the mean streets of Colombia's capital Bogotá.

 

The study shows how a city's traffic build-up is influenced by the characteristic driving style of its motorists, say study authors L. E. Olmos and J. D. Muñoz of the National University of Colombia.

 

To understand a city's roads, you have to get inside the heads of its motorists, say Olmos and Muñoz. "The drivers' driving is very different from city to city, and a realistic traffic model should keep in mind the particularities of each place," they say.

 

So the pair hitched a ride with Bogotá's motorists and measured parameters such as typical acceleration and braking distance. They then gave virtual drivers in a computer simulation a set of rules to follow that were based on their real-world measurements.

 

Virtual traffic congestion mimicked the real thing. The results closely matched the traffic densities and average speeds of Bogotá, the team report in an online physics research bank1.

 

Easy streets

Traffic experts had previously been puzzled as to how Bogotá, with 7 million inhabitants and more than a million private cars, is so jam-free. The answer now seems that Bogotáns are simply more aggressive than their counterparts in London, New York and other huge metropolises.

 

But why the dare-devil style? Olmos and Muñoz point out that, before improvements to Bogotá's public-transport and cycling infrastructure, and restrictions on the use of private cars, the city was routinely gridlocked. Perhaps formerly frustrated motorists are now revelling in the open road.

 

Still, freedom comes at a price, say the researchers: one in six Colombians who die a violent death meet their end in a traffic accident.

 

Courtesy of Nature.

 

I wonder if the next time a cop stops me, I can site this as a reason.

[jordan]

I was thinking (until the last sentence said it) that it is only common sense that aggresive drivers wont cause traffic problem. They'll get out of the way of the slower drivers who then have fewer people to hold up, thus less traffic. However, if you cause a huge pile-up, then you've really stopped traffic for a while. If everyone found a good compramise the world would be better.

 

Oh, and it said these drivers from Bogota are more aggresive than New York drivers? I always thought New York City drivers were about the worst. (Not from personal experience, though).

[Dave]

The trouble is, so many people want to get onto the roads there simply aren't enough people to enforce a properly checked driving test (or so I've been told). The consequence is that for the most part these people don't know what they're doing, and because there's so many of them and they probably make a lot of mistakes, it's naturally going to be very aggressive driving.

[Skye]

When I read the thread title I thought it had to do with the force of a furious persons breath expelling the congestion of their nasal passages.

 

But anyway I can just imagine the researchers, "Somebody get on the blower to Nature, we've found that driving faster results in faster traffic flow!"

 

Whatever will they think of next.