Around these parts, it’s not an unpopular belief that the Hennepin-Lyndale Bottleneck is a bit – ah, how to put it? – oversized. The City of Minneapolis’ Public Works Department does not appear to share this belief, as they’ve submitted a design for the Bottleneck that retains its massivity. When a loved one has a […]
Caption: Vehicles diverging from the free-flow branch can sometimes follow a much more erratic time line, experiencing a wide and unpredictable range of different traffic states. This is the last of the chart triptych about the nonlinear dynamics of traffic congestion, again from Philip Ball’s popular science book Critical Mass. Here he’s using […]
This chart comes from Philip Ball’s interesting book Critical Mass, which describes complex non-linear dynamics using real world examples. There’s one fascinating chapter on traffic jams, and I’m going to post a few of the charts from it. For example, the overall volume of a freeway is a combination of speed + density, something that […]