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When detour doesn't help

13.12.2010

What to do if a congestion of cars regularly paralyzes traffic on a busy highway? It would seem that the answer is obvious: we need to build another road. But it was not there.

According to a paradox formulated in 1968 by the German mathematician Dietrich Brass, an additional road will not help solve the transport problem at all. It will only increase the time that motorists spend on the passage of a problematic section of the highway. If mathematical ignorance prevails and an additional road is nevertheless built, the only right decision is to get rid of it as soon as possible, returning the transport network to its former structure.

Indeed, there have been real cases (in Seoul, Stuttgart, New York and other major cities) where the closure of a newly built bypass speeds up traffic and reduces traffic jams.

The transport collapse of recent years forced mathematicians from the University of Massachusetts (USA) to return to the well-known paradox again. Calculations have shown that in modern conditions, when the accumulation of cars in big cities has reached a certain level, the new road will not worsen traffic in any way - it will simply not be used.

According to scientists, drivers will change their habits and stop using obviously hopeless routes. But at traffic densities below a certain level, bypass roads are useful. Interestingly, the patterns found by mathematicians apply to any network through which something moves, from plumbing to the Internet.

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