Cause of Traffic Jams and Solutions

We show three causes of traffic jams and the solutions.

No. 1 cause of traffic jam "Uphill / sag part (recessed part from downhill to uphill)"

Both on the sag part and the uphill slope, we can say cars speed will unconsciously fall. It is easy to see that the cars running behind it will slow down more to prevent a crash. As a result, unless the first car speeds up, the traffic jam will get worse.

〜Solution〜

It is very important to keep the speed when a car which came from a flat road and started approaching a slope or curve. Therefore, I think that it is necessary to install the system that senses the angles of slopes and curves on the automatic driving car. And the system is to increase the acceleration more than when running on the flat road according to the sharpness of the slope.

 

No. 2 cause of traffic jam "Construction and Accident"

Traffic jam often occurs due to constructions and accidents. Also I will introduce three common cases.
①As the lane decreases, cars lose speed.
②Slowing down because of seeing the actual situation of the accident.
③When accident occurs in the places that blocks a linear part, there is a high possibility that cars must change lanes many times.
Since constructions are done at midnight nowadays, it can be said that the influence is not so serious as it was a while ago. However for accidents, there is a possibility of occurring even in the daytime. I think that it will be possible to reduce the risk of accident occurrence by programing the car to drive safely.

〜Solution〜

For cause ① The attrition experiment which was successfully applied during the confluence experiment (We will introduce in more detail in No. 3 cause of traffic jam "Confluence") can reduce the problem.
For cause ② Equipping the program which prevents the speed from falling at the place where an accident has happened, will solve this problem.
For cause ③ In the case of an accident which has happened in a place that cuts off the straight portion or road has occurred, cars running around there recognize the accident and then change lanes as soon as possible in order to prevent big trouble.

 

No. 3 cause of traffic jam "Confluence"

Naturally, traffic jam will occur because every car (which run in the lane of the side to be joined) will try to reduce the speed in order to margin the cars (which run in the lane of the side to join main lane), that intend to join the main line. Some people may except that the left lane (which is closer to the confluence section) gets more crowded than the right lane (which is far from the confluence section), but those who think such a thing and run in the left lane often try to shift to another lane, after all, there is no difference in the crowded condition by lanes.

〜Solution〜

It is easy to appear the car speed differences when people try to fall the speed to a car trying to join in the range of people's thinking. In order to prevent this, we decide the rate of merging, according to the traffic volume of each of the routes that are to be merged, and merge based on that ratio.

http://www.e-nexco.co.jp/activity/safety/detail_07.html reference