Congestion – UrbanMovements

July 30, 2012April 22, 2013

London 2012: Using Fear to Tame Transportation Demand

One of the biggest advantages, I feel, about studying urban transport phenomena in London is the simple ability to be able look out of the window and see what is actually going on. This week, the Olympics and its (supposed) transportation chaos, came to London.

What has struck me early on, mainly since the introduction of the Games Lanes last week, is a big reduction in the number of vehicles on the road. There have been reports of certain inevitable problems in various parts of the capital, but my experience has been a general reduction in demand on most roads (see a couple of photos I took below). This sentiment has been shared by a number of my colleagues. There has been no word yet from Transport for London as to whether the data is backing this up.

Second, the big public transport problems predicted at certain stations and at certain times, have no yet come to fruition. Warnings were issued widely this morning about potential overcrowding at a number of stations, yet early reports suggest that this is far from the reality – the Guardian highlight a number of citizen reports of empty Tube seats and quiet stations this morning.

Typical fear-inducing GetAheadOfTheGames literature (copyright Transport for London 2012)

It appears that the strategy has worked. In fact, one might even suggest that it has worked better than expected. I would say that this is partly down to the impact of irrationality, specifically the impact of fear. Individuals, scared of potentially having to wait considerable amounts of time at stations only to cram into packed Tube trains, or fearful of long queues on the roads, have changed their habitual plans en masse.

Social Phenomena

The effect has gone to demonstrate, at least to me, the impact that small changes in the behaviour of many individuals can have on the nature of the city. As individuals, we make a choice, we carry out that action, and we are mostly unaware of the impact that decision has on shaping broader phenomena. Yet, in observing the patterns these many individuals make, we can begin to see how individual and social attitudes impact on shaping transportation flows.

This relationship, specifically the impact that fear has had in the context of the Olympics, appears to have caught some analysts on the hop. INRIX, a big transport data provider, predicted earlier in the year the ‘perfect traffic storm‘ in traffic demand during the first few days of the Games (reported in more detail here). This patently failed to happen. The models INRIX employed in making these predictions clearly failed to make consideration for the impact that fear would play in reducing traffic demand. This approach is far from uncommon where transport demand modelling is concerned.

The Games have a long way to run yet, and we may well see a counter movement occur in time as people begin to realise that transportation isn’t as bad as first expected. But I think the impact that fear has held on shaping, at least, the first few days of transportation flows makes for interesting viewing.

April 2, 2012April 21, 2013

Cities of the Future: Towards Technical or Natural Optimisation?

Amanda Erickson put up a nice, simply visualisation of what life might be like in a future of driverless, automated cars. Check it out.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/37751380]

Two things sprang to mind while watching this – first, how terrifying this might be for a passenger in one of these cars, and second, haven’t I seen this sort of thing somewhere else before?

Well, yes, I showed the following video in a lecture last month as demonstration of self-organisation. To me, the patterns look similar – at the higher level you see chaos, but when you observe the actions of individual’s there is usually a rational stream of thought behind the actions they are taking – normally to get to their exit road. Judge for yourself.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mr5Gssaxl6g&version=3&hl=en_US]

I think the stark similarity seen between these two videos raise interesting questions about what we consider as progress in the urban realm. Bare with me as I attempt to explain.

The driverless or automated car is often seen as the natural future of private transportation*, with one of its main benefits being the apparent offer of optimal organisation of traffic flows (e.g. no congestion). And indeed when look at the first video, everything works and works well, perhaps even optimally. But then you look at the second video, and you essentially have the same thing, created solely through the activity of individuals.

It is strange therefore that a fully optimised technical system is generally deemed necessary and superior. When people are left to their own devices, to ‘sort it out between them’, people invariably do. Traffic in Hanoi is not just the only example of this type of self-organisation – the Internet itself is a creation of human ingenuity. Following Monderman’s ideas on Shared Space, perhaps all of these traffic regulations, signage and restrictions actually reduce our need to think about what we are doing. They reduce and remove our ability or will to self-organise, and to the deficit of us all.

So why don’t ‘natural’ answers to technical problems receive a better press? I suspect it is an issue of trust in the citizen. That threat that one person may mess up, and mess it up for the rest of us. Instead of facing the risk and accepting it as part of the solution, we surround ourselves with unnecessary and invasive mechanisms that carry out the task for us. They may cost a lot of money and not be any better than our current solution, but they feel like progress. It feels like things are getting better. So, yes, perhaps automated cars are indeed a thing of the future.

As ever, very interested to hear your thoughts on this.

* I’ve personally never been so sure – mainly because of the safety element, and that fact that many people actually enjoy the process of driving…

March 20, 2012April 19, 2013

London Driver Survey

As part of building a fuller understanding of the way people move around the city by car, I’ve developed a survey to start delving into some of the lesser understood issues.

The survey looks at the extent of use of GPS and similar devices, behaviour around congested areas of the network and usage of traffic information. The results will contribute towards the building of a better model of driver behaviour.

You can find the survey here – http://goo.gl/UDrFI

Please pass it on to all of the motorists in London that you know!

July 22, 2011April 19, 2013

From Road Closure to Road Congestion

Much of my work attempts to recreate the macro from the micro. That is the explanation of large-scale effects through the examination of small-scale behaviours. I look at how these develop over space and time.

So, more specifically, I look at how road congestion forms in cities and how we, as travellers, all contribute towards it.

As part of my early work on this stuff, I developed a simulation looking at how traveller decisions impact on the flow of traffic in adverse situations. This consisted of the development of an Agent-based Model (ABM) using the Java-based Repast Simphony framework. After a fair bit of faffing with Repast (which, I should add, is great although has a considerable learning curve in comparison to some ABM software), I have a model that demonstrates the impact of road closures across a population of driving agents.

The video below shows how the population of individually-cognating agents move from an area of origins (in green) to an area of destinations (in red) through London. All of the agents move through geographic space, specifically an area around UCL in Euston. So, this first video shows the normal situation, the next video will show how that changes once we mess things up a bit. (By the way, the video takes a few seconds to get moving, just allowing me a few seconds of in-lecture explanation).

Although the model is relatively simple in traffic simulation terms (with no traffic lights and regulations etc), I think it does show where concentrations of traffic form. Particularly through the Euston Road/Tottenham Court Road junction. So, what would happen if we closed this junction? This…

I think it’s interesting to see the redistribution in traffic around the network. Knowing that this junction is closed, you get a lot more movement along other roads suggesting that traffic would be considerably slower in these areas. Clearly, the exact where’s and when’s in this scenario are some way of what reality might show. Not only do we not have the impact of road regulations, but each individual holds a perfect knowledge of the network, proceeds towards their target along the shortest path and has prior knowledge of the closure ahead. These are three important aspects I address in other pieces of work that I’ll put up later. I also realise a bit of flow data would be quite useful here, but considering the pure conjecture of this scenario I’m not sure it’ll add much!