Self-Organizing Behavior at W. Broadway and Grand
Reader Timothy writes in about the intersection of W. Broadway and Grand in Manhattan, “a notoriously noisy and difficult intersection.”
“This morning I watched for an hour while cars, trucks and pedestrians shared this space quietly…with civility!! little honking; no aggressive driving; no traffic cop.
Why? because the light was out.
No one had to speed up and honk to make the green light on time; no one honked or changed lanes to take advantage of the narrow window of time the light granted them. Everyone came to a stop, looked around, (wondering why the light was dead, and what they should do) and proceeded slowly thru.
Instead of a line of cars waiting for the light to change, alternate sides vying w/ each other for the few precious moments allowing them the right to pass thru….no one had to wait very long. And in fact the alternate sides traded back and forth, almost at a one-to-one ratio. No one had to wait, so no one got stuck in a line, so no one sped up, so no one honked, so there was no need for aggressive driving! even pedestrians got their due.
This is interesting (and hard to believe no one honked!), and I’ve heard things like before — newspaper accounts of how people felt, in blackouts and such, the traffic actually worked better. Or of how traffic police do a better job than lights (though the classic problem with police is coordinating intersections). Of course, it’s hard to really gauge things like flow from one’s own car, although sensing cooperative behavior is certainly possible. Whether it would last over a week or a month, instead of in a temporary situation, is another question. Still, one also hears, in those same blackouts, about the number of traffic accidents, and how they must be attributable to the blackout. Though this doesn’t explain the accidents on those days when the lights are functioning; but again, real data, as far as I can tell, is thin on the ground here.
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 6:45 am and is filed under Congestion, Traffic Engineering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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