The Physics of Traffic Behavior

Questions 1 – 4

Reading Passage 1 has five sections, A-E.

Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.

Write the correct number, i-viii, in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

i Dramatic effects can result from small changes in traffic just as in nature
ii How a maths experiment actually reduced traffic congestion
iii How a concept from one field of study was applied in another
iv A lack of investment in driver training
v Areas of doubt and disagreement between experts
vi How different countries have dealt with traffic congestion
vii The impact of driver behaviour on traffic speed
viii A proposal to take control away from the driver

1 Section A

Example

Section B i

2 Section C

3 Section D

4 Section E
[Note: This is an extract from a Part 2 text about the physics of traffic behaviour.]

© 2000 The Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic Magazine. All rights reserved.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

The Physics of Traffic Behavior

A Some years ago, when several theoretical physicists, principally Dirk Helbing and Boris
Kerner of Stuttgart, Germany, began publishing papers on traffic flow in publications normally
read by traffic engineers, they were clearly working outside their usual sphere of investigation.
They had noticed that if they simulated the movement of vehicles on a highway, using the
equations that describe how the molecules of a gas move, some very strange results emerged.
Of course, vehicles do not behave exactly like gas molecules: for example, drivers try to avoid
collisions by slowing down when they get too near another vehicle, whereas gas molecules
have no such concern. However, the physicists modified the equations to take the differences
into account and the overall description of traffic as a flowing gas has proved to be a very good
one; the moving-gas model of traffic reproduces many phenomena seen in real-world traffic.

The strangest thing that came out of these equations, however, was the implication that
congestion can arise completely spontaneously; no external causes are necessary. Vehicles
can be flowing freely along, at a density still well below what the road can handle, and then
suddenly gel into a slow-moving ooze. Under the right conditions a brief and local fluctuation in
the speed or the distance between vehicles is all it takes to trigger a system-wide breakdown
that persists for hours. In fact, the physicists’ analysis suggested such spontaneous breakdowns
in traffic flow probably occur quite frequently on highways.

B Though a decidedly unsettling discovery, this showed striking similarities to the phenomena
popularized as ‘chaos theory’. This theory has arisen from the understanding that in any
complex interacting system which is made of many parts, each part affects the others.
Consequently, tiny variations in one part of a complex system can grow in huge but
unpredictable ways. This type of dramatic change from one state to another is similar to what
happens when a chemical substance changes from a vapor to a liquid. It often happens that
water in a cloud remains as a gas even after its temperature and density have reached the point
where it could condense into water droplets. However, if the vapor encounters a solid surface,
even something as small as a speck of dust, condensation can take place and the transition
from vapor to liquid finally occurs. Helbing and Kerner see traffic as a complex interacting
system. They found that a small fluctuation in traffic density can act as the ‘speck of dust’
causing a sudden change from freely moving traffic to synchronized traffic, when vehicles in all
lanes abruptly slow down and start moving at the same speed, making passing impossible.

C The physicists have challenged proposals to set a maximum capacity for vehicles on
highways. They argue that it may not be enough simply to limit the rate at which vehicles are
allowed to enter a highway, rather, it may be necessary to time each vehicle’s entry onto a
highway precisely to coincide with a temporary drop in the density of vehicles along the road.
The aim of doing this would be to smooth out any possible fluctuations in the road conditions
that can trigger a change in traffic behavior and result in congestion. They further suggest that
preventing breakdowns in the flow of traffic could ultimately require implementing the radical
idea that has been suggested from time to time: directly regulating the speed and spacing of
individual cars along a highway with central computers and sensors that communicate with each
car’s engine and brake controls.

D However, research into traffic control is generally centered in civil engineering departments
and here the theories of the physicists have been greeted with some skepticism. Civil engineers
favor a practical approach to problems and believe traffic congestion is the result of poor road
construction (two lanes becoming one lane or However, research into traffic control is generally
centered in civil engineering departments and here the theories of the physicists have been
greeted with some skepticism. Civil engineers favor a practical approach to problems and
believe traffic congestion is the result of poor road construction (two lanes becoming one lane or
dangerous curves), which constricts the flow of traffic. Engineers questioned how well the
physicists’ theoretical results relate to traffic in the real world. Indeed, some engineering
researchers questioned whether elaborate chaos-theory interpretations are needed at all, since
at least some of the traffic phenomena the physicists’ theories predicted seemed to be similar to
observations that had been appearing in traffic engineering literature under other names for
years; observations which had straightforward cause-and-effect explanations.

E James Banks, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at San Diego State
University in the US, suggested that a sudden slowdown in traffic may have less to do with
chaos theory than with driver psychology. As traffic gets heavier and the passing lane gets more
crowded, aggressive drivers move to other lanes to try to pass, which also tends to even out the
speed between lanes. He also felt that another leveling force is that when a driver in a fast lane
brakes a little to maintain a safe distance between vehicles, the shock wave travels back much
more rapidly than it would in the other slower lanes, because each following driver has to react
more quickly. Consequently, as a road becomes congested, the faster moving traffic is the first
to slow down.

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