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Traffic Increase in Denver, Colorado

I am from a suburb of Denver, Colorado, a rapidly growing city in terms of population, and it has been clear recently that our infrastructure is not well supporting this growing population and their commuting needs. I have personally noticed over the summer break that it takes significantly longer (maybe 10-15% longer than before, in my perception) to get places, especially during high-traffic times, than it did before I left for college. Many Denverites have recognized this problem, and one comprehensive article from the Denver Post lays out the issue, its past and proposed infrastructural and personal solutions.

The problems regarding traffic relates to the concept of game theory in multiple ways. First of all, the way one can analyze the traffic problem completely depends on what you consider the payoffs to be. If the goal in mind of a commuter is to live in the most green way possible, namely reducing CO2 emissions, then they would find that the best response (to produce the least amount of emissions) would be to take public transportation, bike, and/or walk. The article commends Colorado for doing a great job at increasing the possibilities for biking and walking, and cites spending a large amount of funds on creating light rail lines. Similarly, if the payoffs would be about how much traffic is avoided for the sake of not being in a potentially stressful and frustrating situation (for example, a new driver who gets nervous being on a very busy road), then their best response would be to also take a light rail or utilize back roads/neighborhood routes. Again, the article mentions how Colorado has grown much recently and has many more neighborhood developments so one may find a variety of alternative, albeit circuitous routes.

To give a specific example, in a game of taking the “greenest” route, the players could be 20 environmentally conscious commuters, the strategies could be each driving a car and emitting 10 lbs CO2/person, all 20 sharing 5 cars and emitting 10 lbs CO2/car, any combination of individual drivers and carpooling people (say, 10 individually drive and 10 pack into a van), or any number or all of the people taking a light rail, which in total only uses 7lbs CO2 total, regardless of number of people using it. It is obvious here that the best response for all of the environmentally conscious people is to use the light rail, because it will always emit more CO2 than any of the people using cars. There is no Nash Equilibrium in this situation  because there is no incentive to use cars since they always emit more CO2 (in this simplified scenario).

Nevertheless, we all know that the majority of people care most about travel time. There have been many efforts made to reduce congestion in the Denver area, most of which have involved road widening. From personal experience in my area, this has majorly helped reduce congestion on major suburban roads. However on highways, adding lanes may not always be the best way to address this problem. Since many people would realize this change and imagine a decrease in traffic during peak times, it is likely that many people would switch back to peak time commute and just end up with the exact same amount of traffic as before. In any event, people continue driving because in any traffic game whose payoff is (negative) travel time, driving takes the least amount of time, at 27 minutes on average. This article urges people to take public transportation, but on average this commute takes 47 minutes. The best response for time efficiency will always be driving, since the total travel time is always less. Maybe one day the congestion on Denver’s roads will be so extreme that it actually is more time efficient to take public transportation.

//http://www.denverpost.com/2015/12/19/think-traffic-is-bad-around-the-denver-area-just-wait-a-decade-or-two

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