Jeffersonville Indiana Health Insurance

STAWAR: Rat-running and runabouts

> SOUTHERN INDIANA — The closure of the Sherman Minton Bridge earlier this month sent us all scrambling for alternative routes. I quickly discovered that only about 10,000 other motorists knew my secret shortcut, down Corydon Ridge Road, along the hairpin twists and turns, through Brown’s Station Way, to Jeffersonville. In Florida, I worked for a man who had formerly driven a delivery truck in Tampa. He knew every short cut in town, as well as every place you could get a decent Cuban sandwich. When he would drive to meetings, it frequently took longer to get there, but the fried plantains always made up for it. On the rare occasion when we would get totally lost, he referred to it as a “frolicking detour.” The most enthusiastic users of short cuts are known as rat runners. Rat-running is mostly using secondary streets, instead of main roads, to avoid traffic delays. Although it may have something to do with “the rat race,” no one is sure where the name originated. In the 1960s, behavioral psychologists, who studied rats, were nicknamed “rat-runners,” and rodent maze behavior is often compared to how humans act in traffic.  Besides using residential side streets that parallel main routes, other rat-running techniques include driving through parking lots to avoid traffic lights and exiting main roads to dodge traffic jams. Rat-runners like to keep their shortcuts secret. I wouldn’t have mentioned mine, if I thought it could possibly get any worse. These so-called “traffic-calming” measures include installing four-way stops, speed bumps, rumble strips, curb extensions, cobblestones and traffic circles. Some of the newer residential developments have purposely included long winding roads and multiple dead-ends to discourage these practices. Other cities have designated certain streets as one-way and have limited access to through traffic during rush hours. I have to hand it to the city of Bartlesville, Okla., which in early September sent all of its residents, enclosed in their utility bills, a pamphlet on how to use roundabouts, just before the city opened its first roundabout. You can still download “A Citizen’s Guide to Modern Roundabouts” from the city website at http://tinyurl.com/TrafficRA. (Important hint: entering traffic must always yield) While we all want to take the shortest route possible, research conducted by Hyejin Youn and Hawoong Jeong, of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Michael Gastner, of the Santa Fe Institute, indicated that selfish shortcuts can do more harm than good by actually slowing traffic down. They concluded that when everyone tries to use the shortest route, this jams up the entire network. However, as traffic flow increases on the shorter route, the longer one starts to look attractive, so some drivers will switch back. Traffic flow between the two routes eventually reaches what is called a Nash equilibrium, named after mathematician John Nash (from Ron Howard’s movie “A Beautiful Mind”). At this point, both routes are relatively slow and neither holds any advantage. Average driving time is much higher than it would have been if drivers had split equally between the two routes. For routes with many different links, researchers were able to calculate what they called the “price of anarchy,” which is the slowness introduced to the network by drivers all seeking the best route. In Boston, for example, this resulted in an average route that took 30 percent longer than the optimal route. In London, it resulted in a 24 percent increase in wasted time, and in New York 28 percent. At this point, you might think that maybe authorities should just add more network capacity (additional roads or bridges). Mathematician Dietrich Braess discovered that adding extra capacity — when drivers choose their own best routes — can in some cases paradoxically reduce overall network efficiency. This is true because the Nash equilibrium of a system usually is not optimal. In the worst case scenario, actual driving time may be twice as long as the optimal driving time. In Boston, for example, there were 246 streets in the main traffic route. For 240 of these streets, closing any one of them created even more severe traffic jams. However, for the remaining six streets, closing any one of them actually reduced drivers’ average travel time. Similar results were also seen in London and New York.      I suppose the odds that closing the Sherman Minton Bridge will actually improve traffic flow is pretty slim. However, if I go down Daisy Lane again, at least I won’t be contributing to the traffic problems on the Kennedy Bridge, because I’ll be stuck in that dang circle. Round and round she goes, where she lands nobody knows.

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