#TIL: Phantom Traffic Jams

by Jagriti Arora

Have you ever been stuck in a traffic jam, only to cross the seemingly “problematic spot”, and found…nothing? What you have encountered is what experts call a Phantom Traffic Jam.

Often when stuck bumper to bumper in traffic we sit in our cars thinking ‘oh! there must be a car that’s broken down in the middle of the road’, or ‘pretty sure people are holding up the traffic arguing about an accident’, only to finally cross the stretch and see no car, nor a bunch of arguing people. We look for a cause but we find none. That’s when we experience a Phantom Traffic Jam.

To understand it further, consider the proverbial chicken crossing the road — the unassuming bird begins crossing the road, slowing down the first car approaching it, which in turn slows down the car that’s following the first car, and the car that follows after and then more till the time a distant car which cannot even spot the chicken grinds to a halt. By the time the last car stops the chicken would have crossed the road, leaving no apparent cause of traffic jam behind.

One might wonder, why should we even talk about Phantom Jams? One of the key reasons is that it throws new light on the way we understand congestion. Rather than just a dis-balance between quantities of vehicles and roads, traffic jam could also be a lack of rhythm a road seems to follow

Today I learnt (TIL) is a weekly series by OMI that brings you interesting nuggets of information that you didn’t know you needed.