Winter and Construction
“There are only two seasons in the Midwest: winter and construction.”
Being from Minnesota, I always see construction projects going whenever the ground is free of snow. Especially near the Twin Cities, there’s always a highway or road leading up to the metro area that’s closed off. What are the construction workers doing each year? Are they working on the same project? Do they just start one project after another? Either way, I was curious to see what kinds of improvements could be made to the highways that would help Minnesotans with their daily commute times. The linked articles touches upon the traffic congestion issues that Minnesotians face on their way to the metro, and a list of solutions that could potentially fix the issue.
The first and most straightforward solution is to build more roads. However, the article states that this does not help with congestion in the long run; as we learned in class about network traffic, new roads can actually worsen travel time. So instead of adding more roads, the other category that solutions can fall under is reducing the need for roads.
One way to do that is expand upon public transit systems. In terms of graph theory, this would ideally reduce the total number of vehicles on the road if people carpool together. However, the article states that the metro area is too spread for this to be cost-effective. Another solution was to have people live closer to their destination. In a graph model, moving nodes closer together would reduce the travel time between them, and might even remove the number of cars in the network if they choose other modes of transportation, such as walking or biking.
The fourth solution was to charge money for use of roads during peak hours. If implemented citywide, the graph model becomes more complicated since the shortest travel time is no longer the only factor in consideration for each person. What matters now is how much money people have or are willing to spend in order to decrease travel time along a certain path. Therefore, the strategy for each driver now depends on how much they value their time versus their money, which is different for each person.
The fifth solution is the most ambitious: reliance on self-driving cars. By letting computers do the decision making rather than individual drivers, this would have a large potential to decrease travel time. As we learned in class, the Nash Equilibrium does not describe what’s most efficient, but what the most likely outcome would be if people were acting on their own self-interest. With self-driving cars being able to communicate and cooperate with other cars on the road, travel times could be greatly shortened by dynamically calculating what’s best for all drivers. For example, if a path’s travel time depends on how many cars are on it, self-driving cars could calculate how many cars could be on that road before the other path becomes more efficient. However, an interesting point the article makes is that driverless cars could actually result in more cars on the road, since it enables empty cars or those without a driver’s license to travel.
There is no one clear solution to the problem, and such potential solutions will take a long time to implement. And in order to make any kind of improvements to the roads, the construction must go on.