Braess’ Paradox in Australia
Australia started to try and undergo some changes in it’s roads and transportation systems. When trying to add what would’ve been known as the East West Link, that project failed due to disagreements. In addition, the Victorian Government ended up wasting $339 million dollars on it. The disagreements were if the addition of this new road would either increase or decrease the road traffic. There was also no great understanding of the traffic flow with not one consistent set of numbers for the road network. One source would come up with a certain amount, while another source would come up with a completely different amount.
This relates to the idea of the Braess’ Paradox. This idea related to the article because it involves making new roads in order to effectively speed up travel time by optimizing the roads and making sure that people would spend as little time as possible on the roads. Additionally, that there would be no traffic and that they would have as least cars as possible as well. If Australia took the time to carefully look at the network, that is the different pathways from point A to point B and then used Braess’ Paradox to mathematically ensure that building a new road would’ve been effective or not. Doing this beforehand could’ve also actually saved them hundreds of millions of dollars.
(Source: http://phys.org/news/2015-05-maths-congestionsprings-traffic.html )