CHICAGO TRAFFIC JAMS MOVIE

In ours, we divide a road network into free-flowing roads, congested roads, and recovered roads. In the traditional model, epidemiologists divide a population into groups of people who are susceptible to a disease, people who are infected, and people who have recovered. We adopted what is called the susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model, commonly used in epidemics, and applied it to traffic jams in Sydney, Melbourne, New York, Chicago, Montreal and Paris. We have shown that a similar modelling framework can be used to describe how traffic jams spread in cities.

Scientists use contagion models to describe the spread of an infectious disease in a population, as well as things like the spread of a computer or mobile phone virus through the internet and the spread of news or misinformation on social media. To overcome this challenge, scientists have more recently started searching for simpler ways of describing and predicting urban traffic congestion. While this may not sound like a big deal for transport planning purposes, it is actually one of the biggest hurdles for their use in practice for traffic operations and control. In a large metropolitan area, these models often take tens of minutes or hours to run, even using cloud-based and other high-performance computing technologies. Many existing models describe traffic well but require so much computational power that it is difficult to use them in real time for traffic control. University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney) Big traffic, big computing The DynaMel model describes traffic flow in Melbourne. The most recent example of such powerful data sources and analysis techniques are the community mobility reports recently released by Google, which show changes in mobility in cities around the world due to the spread of COVID-19.

Today, the most advanced method to measure and monitor traffic in cities uses anonymous location data from mobile phones with sophisticated mathematical and computer simulation models. Since then, numerous data collection and modelling techniques have been developed.

CHICAGO TRAFFIC JAMS MOVIE

Greenshields used a movie camera to take consecutive pictures with a constant time interval to measure traffic. This was only 25 years after the production of the first Ford Model T in 1908. The first simple description of traffic flow based on observations was published in 1933 by the American researcher Bruce Greenshields. 75 Years of the Fundamental Diagram for Traffic Flow Theory, Transportation Research Circular, Number E-C149, June 2011 Pioneering traffic researcher Bruce Greenshields using a movie camera to measure traffic flow in 1933.

Chicago traffic jams