An invention that can minimize traffic jams by taking down traffic waves. Stop waves, ghost jams, traffic snakes. Howvever you may want to call them, traffic waves are a fundamental cause of day to day traffic jams. These are travelling disturbances in the distribution of vehicles on a highway. How do they occur? For a wave to start there must be a disturbance, for example a pedestrian crossing the road. The pedestrian forces a car to slow down, a slowed down car forces the car behind it to slow down and the car behind it to slow a bit more, and the car behind it to slow even more until one car comes to a complete stop. After which the following cars are forced to remain stationary, each succesing car forced to stay at rest for longer.
CGP Grey expalins this phenomena best in his youtube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE
and theres this one which explains it with a computer model, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goVjVVaLe10
Traffic wave simulation by +iamfranco; https://iamfranco.github.io/trafficWave/
and this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Suugn-p5C1M describes an experiment conducted by japanese researchers who made cars drive in a circle to observe whether or not any jams would be seen. It makes sense to expect that no traffic jams would be made, but thats not what happened. Now consider the modern road system and all the possible disturbances. Traffic waves are bound to thrive.
In today's highways and cities, there are so many things that can cause these disturbances: Pedestrians, overtaking cars and intersections. intersections are the worst. Notice that when you're waiting in an intersection for the signal and it gives you the green light you cant really take off immediately, you have to wait until the car infront of you takes off and gives you the distance you need to move. You're forced to be stuck even when the light is green, and this wastes time! Added up, this time makes cars have to wait a significant duration longer to cross an intersection. This is why those long roads that have intersections far apart from each other, those roads that can't possibly be jamed, get jamed. Traffic waves cause jams from intersections to extend further and further into the road making jams that last for hours. I like to call these intersections, traffic wave generators.
So whats the solution? The solution for traffic waves is to keep vehicles apart from each other at a good distance. So when a car going down a highway is forced to slow down, the cars behind it should try to maintain that good distance, this will facilitate traffic flow in such a way that a traffic wave can't emerge. In an intersection, if waiting cars maintain this distance they can all take off at the same time because they won't need to wait until the car infront of them gives them distance to move, thus no wave to stop you. Maintaining distance between vehicles makes traffic wave generators and any disturbance much, much less likely to create large traffic waves. Refer this page; http://trafficwaves.org/tanim.html. You may expect that by maintaining this uniform distance, it would cause vehicles to line up and and jam exits further back, but the idea is that intersections and stops can spit out vehicles faster than they collect.
The issue is.. how do you get people do maintain that distance? Its hard enough for the human brain to accurately decide what that distance is, but also taking into consideration the fact that people would just forget to do so or may not be bothered to think about it, that is unlikely.
Now im finally going to explain what the invention is..
Fig: First prototype of the traffic wave disruptor. Future versions can be much smaller.
You can get people to maintain that distance by giving them a signal. The traffic wave disruptor is a signal. It uses an ultrasonic distance sensor attached to the front of the vehicle to measure the distance between their vehicle and the vehicle infront of them. If the distance is below a set threshold ( the distance vehicles should maintain between each other ) A yellow LED will light up, indicating that the driver should back up. When the distance reaches the threshold, a green LED lights up indicating that they should stop. The more vehicles there are on the road that have this signal, the more that traffic waves can be stopped, because each individual vehicle with a traffic wave disruptor will contribute to take down traffic waves. The TWD can even double as an anti-collision warning signal.
Hopefully we can get the costs down on this product and make it possible for more and more drivers to own one.
The Traffic Wave Disruptor is opensource hardware and therefore free for anyone to redesign, manufacture, sell, use commercially or non-commercially. In support of the opensource movement.
So please consider collaborating on this project and bring an end to traffic waves :D
This product is certified by the Open Source HardWare Association. https://www.oshwa.org/definition/
Certfication directory; http://certificate.oshwa.org/certification-directory/
If you have any questions you can contact me by email- [email protected]
Diagrams and design files available above