Coping with congestion on the roads:

Traffic attack

Aditha Dissanayake

Ever observed a group of ants moving in a single line? Ever wondered why they do not get caught up in their own traffic? Ants certainly seem to know how to keep their trails from clogging up with too many jams. How come we don't?

Traffic jams

The cause of a lot of the traffic congestion we battle everyday is pretty simple: too many people want to travel at the same time in the same direction to the same destination: the result? Too many of us sitting in traffic jams, fuming with exasperation, frustrated to find ourselves crawling instead of moving at 'normal' driving speed, specially so when we know the vehicles we are using can easily be driven over 100 Km per hour. Further more, travel delays due to traffic congestion causes air pollution, raise national fuel consumption and adds heavy costs to goods delivery - all in all, misallocating scarce resources and causing economic inefficiency.

More alarmingly, recent studies show children who breath city air with high levels of traffic exhaust on average, scored more poorly on intelligence tests and were more prone to depression, anxiety and attention problems than children growing up in environments with cleaner air. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal: older men and women long exposed to higher levels of traffic-related particles and ozone have also had memory and reasoning problems that effectively added five years to their mental age. The emissions may also heighten the risk of Alzheimer's disease and speed the effects of Parkinson's.

Though scientists are only beginning to understand the basic biology of car exhaust's toxic neural effects, according to neurochemist Annette Kirshner at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina, "There is real cause for concern," as pubic-health studies and laboratory experiments suggest that, at every stage of life, traffic fumes exact a measurable toll on mental capacity, intelligence and emotional stability. As roadways choke on traffic, researchers suspect that the tailpipe exhaust from cars and trucks-especially tiny carbon particles could lead to heart disease, cancer, respiratory ailments as well as cause damages to brain cells.

Bad for us, bad for Mother Nature too. It comes as no surprise to learn that motor vehicles are one of the largest sources of pollution worldwide and that areas with the largest number of cars on the road see higher levels of air pollution on average.

What might come as a surprise though, is the fact that slower moving traffic emits more pollution than when cars move at freeway speeds. In other words, traffic jams are bad for the environment.

Even though on the surface it might seem that your car burns more fuel the faster you go, the truth is your car burns more when you find yourself stuck in what looks more like a parking lot than a highway. The constant acceleration and braking - stop-and-go traffic - burns more fuel, and therefore pumps more pollutants into the air. One study suggests that emissions start to go up when average freeway speed dips below 56km/h. They also start to go up dramatically as the average speed goes above 72 km/h. So, the "golden zone" for fuel-consumption and emissions from your vehicle if it was made in Japan or India, could be somewhere between 56km/h and 72 km/h.

Imagine cruising through Ragagiriya at 60 km/h on a weekday morning. It could happen, in your dreams. With over one billion cars on the roads of the world today, with the number estimated to double by 2020, it is hard to imagine that immensely expanding the total capacity of the road system in major cities or making the use of public transport compulsory to everyone, will be the best answers.

Who then could give us the perfect solution? Ants of course. Scientists think the problem faced by ants in managing their traffic on foraging trails is the same as that faced by humans on main roads during peak hours. Ants know how to solve complex problems of traffic regulation by using simple rules that are not imposed externally and arbitrarily (as in vehicle traffic), but that result from local direct contacts or indirect interactions between individuals. According to researcher Dr Audrey Dussutour, the collective behaviour of ants can be used as a model to study how individual behaviours can be optimised to serve a collective good - i.e to create more 'intelligent' transport systems.

The best way to do so would be by harnessing modern technology that would help commuters to make each others' journeys congestion-free through interaction with each other. In an era when smart phone apps and cloud based services are making life easier in every arena of life, it is surely high time that a solution for road congestion too should be only a finger tip's distance away in the form of an app.

"Aside from the usual tasks of calling and texting, the apps we download into our phones have made us able to accomplish tasks that we could not have imagined doing while we are on the road, a few years back" says Director - Marketing, at road.lk., Madhavi Boralessa. Like ants who keep each other informed of what is happening ahead of them through direct or indirect messages, users of the traffic app introduced a few months ago by road.lk have now begun to help each other beat heavy traffic all over Sri Lanka. All commuters who have a GPS-enabled Android phone can download road.lk's free Traffic Alerts app, to find out about the 'traffic hot-spots' all over the country based on the data sent by on the spot traffic observers, i.e other commuters. Those who do not have the required phones can still log onto the road.lk website for free information before they leave home, so that they would know which roads are blocked, which roads are fairly free of congestion.

The day will surely dawn when the unpredictability of the time we spend on the road - thirty minutes from Battaramulla to Borella on the Parliament road today, two hours tomorrow - will be nightmares of the past. Thanks to new technology you will soon be able to stop traffic blocks from ruining your day, anymore than actually having to go to work already does.

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