Did you know? Avoiding traffic jams can be simple

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | We’ve all experienced `phantom traffic jams’ that arise without any apparent cause. Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) recently showed that we would have fewer such traffic jams if we made one small change to how we drive: no more tailgating – or driving too closely behind the vehicle in front.

Specifically, the team’s new journal article argues that if we all kept an equal distance between the cars in front of and behind us – an approach that MIT professor Berthold Horn describes as “bilateral control” – we would all get where we are going almost twice as quickly.

“We humans tend to view the world in terms of what’s ahead of us, both literally and conceptually, so it might seem counter-intuitive to look backwards,” says Horn, who co-authored the article with postdoctoral associate Liang Wang. “But driving like this could have a dramatic effect in reducing travel time and fuel consumption without having to build more roads or make other changes to infrastructure.”

Horn concedes that drivers themselves are unlikely to change their forward-looking ways anytime soon, so he suggests reliance on devices that manufacturers are incorporating in vehicles these days, such as adaptive cruise-control systems. He says, however, that the companies need to update their adaptive cruise systems and add sensors to both their front and rear bumpers. Most of today’s systems only have front sensors.