The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

Author:James Surowiecki
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780307275059
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2005-08-15T16:00:00+00:00

III

One reason coordination on the highway is so difficult is the diversity of the drivers. As we’ve seen, diversity is essential to much good decision making. But diversity can also make solving coordination problems harder. Mitch Resnick demonstrated this many years ago in a traffic simulation he devised with his computer program StarLogo, which represented one of the first forays into modeling the way individual interactions produce unanticipated results. In the simulation, Resnick writes in his book Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams, as long as cars went off at evenly spaced intervals and traveled at equal speeds, the traffic flowed smoothly. But as soon as speed became variable and cars were forced to react to each other by braking or speeding up, the traffic jams started. All it took was a bit of randomness programmed into each car’s position and speed for the trouble to start. Similarly, the appearance of a radar trap, which forced drivers to decelerate quickly and made speeds highly variable, could create a jam. All of which raises an obvious question: If driver diversity is the problem, could driver homogeneity be the solution?

In August of 1997, a group of researchers from California’s PATH program took over a seven-and-a-half-mile stretch of I-15 near San Diego to try to answer that question. The researchers brought with them eight Buick LeSabres, which they had automated by equipping them with a couple of hundred thousand dollars of equipment, including steering and gas-pedal controls, motion sensors, radar, and a radio communication system that could transmit information about the car’s speed and acceleration fifty times a second. The point of the automation was twofold: first, to allow the cars to drive themselves, and second, to allow a platoon of vehicles to travel together down the road, synchronizing their speeds via radio communication. And it worked. The LeSabres went off in a convoy, separated from each other by a mere twenty-one feet. The cars’ movements were perfectly synchronized, because the delay caused by driver reaction was absent. As soon as one car changed speed, all the others immediately adjusted. Over the course of four days, the cars traveled at sixty-five miles an hour for hundreds of miles, carrying real passengers, with nary an accident. It was an ideal vision of a perfectly organized highway.

How would it work in the real world? Essentially, you’d create dedicated highways, by burying magnetic markers four feet apart along the road. (The cars use the markers to read the road and ensure that they’re in the right lane.) Once you were on the highway, your car would be lined up in a platoon with others, and you’d travel down the road together until your exit. (Presumably each platoon could be pegged to a particular off-ramp.) Equipping the highways wouldn’t be cheap. It would cost at least $10,000 a mile, and you’d have to pay to equip cars, too. But a smoothly running automatic highway could double or even triple capacity, while also eliminating traffic jams. That would mean that fewer new highways would be built, and that people would spend less time in gridlock.

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