Driverless Cars and the Death of the Traffic Jam

It’s a Sunday afternoon, and you’re out for a drive on your local highway…

Looking off in the distance, you notice there isn’t a cloud in the sky. The warmth of the sun heats the nape of your neck and reminds you of what a beautiful day it is outside.

You could be headed to the beach, you could be off to visit family and friends, or perhaps the open road just helps you clear your head. It doesn’t really make a difference to be honest.

As you continue your trip onward, traffic begins to tighten up. The distance between you and the cars around you begins to shrink. Break lights become increasingly frequent, and soon enough you find yourself rolling along at a snail’s pace.

You theorize there must be an accident or roadwork somewhere up ahead, for the glare of the sun is at your back and the road in front of you is free of any standing hazards for miles — no merges, no bends or curves, just a straight shot of fresh black pavement.

But before you ever see evidence of such an accident or construction zone, you find yourself back at full cruising speed. Looking in your rearview, traffic is backed up as far as the eye can see, yet ahead of you is miles of completely open road.

With no apparent bottleneck at fault, you can’t help but consider the cause of the puzzling traffic jam you just left behind. Could a deer have run across the road? A gaggle of ducks passed by? Maybe someone blew a tire and changed it before you could take notice…

Alas, though, none of those conclusions seem to do, and you turn to the only viable explanation you can come up with: Sunday drivers are a bunch of idiots.

While that’s certainly an enticing conclusion to make, the reality is that Sunday drivers, as with Monday through Saturday drivers, are simply human.

The Phantom Jam

Now, I’m well aware traffic flow isn’t exactly the most enthralling topic to talk about, but bear with me here for a moment. The study of traffic flow actually ties into some incredibly exciting and disruptive technologies and is even one of the core components behind a potential $87 billion industry.

Let me explain…

The scenario I described above is what you call a phantom traffic jam. A phantom traffic jam occurs when there is no creditable obstacle on a road. It’s congestion that occurs without a bottleneck of any sort.

The concept of phantom traffic jams has been around for decades, but the underlying cause/existence of this kind of congestion wasn’t agreed upon until recently. Believe it or not, some of the brightest minds in mathematics dedicate their careers to developing traffic models and theories.

MIT’s Morris Flynn is one of these individuals, and he describes phantom jams as follows:

A chain of equidistant vehicles that move all with the same velocity will not remain in this nice configuration. Instead, a small perturbation grows, and builds up to become a wave of high vehicle density. This phenomenon is called phantom traffic jam, since it arises in free flowing traffic, without any obvious reason, such as obstacles, bottlenecks, etc.

Many traffic flow experts and mathematicians originally theorized that phantom jams had to be the product of some kind of obstacle in the road but that we just couldn’t point to it. The idea was that all traffic originates at a hazard, whether it be the glaring sun, potholes, or a sharp bend in the road — but as it turns out, that’s just not true.

In 2008, the Mathematical Society of Traffic Flow put the phantom traffic jam theory to the test. In a real world demonstration, 22 cars were put in a perfect one-lane circle and placed evenly apart. The drivers were given directions to travel at an even distance from each other at constant speed.

According to many traffic flow models at the time, this circle of cars should have been able to operate without a jam. After all, the road was clear of obstacles, there were no points of merging, and there was ample space between each car.

Yet within less than 15 seconds of the experiment, the even flow of traffic began to break down. All it takes is one vehicle slowing down for a shock-wave effect to ensue. 30 seconds in, and cars are coming to a complete stop.

The only viable culprit? Human error.

Inescapable Human Folly

Thanks to the work of folks like Morris Flynn and organizations such as the Mathematical Society of Traffic Flow, we know now with certainty that even in ideal conditions, traffic is bound to occur at high densities — that is, with human drivers, at least.

In hindsight, these traffic models are actually quite obvious. I don’t know a single driver who keeps his speed at a constant pace for more than a few seconds in high-density traffic, and I’ve yet to come across anyone who doesn’t overreact to brake lights in front of them now and again.

As common as it is to place fault elsewhere when on the road, the truth is none of us are perfect. Sure, there are plenty of people who drive like assholes out there, but if you think no one has ever labeled you as one of them, you’re most certainly wrong.

Quite simply, you and I are not skilled enough to drive without being a danger to ourselves and those around us, and we’re not skilled enough to prevent traffic, either. It should be of little surprise that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently faulted 93% of traffic incidents on “driver behavioral error.”

According to MIT research, phantom traffic jams can only be cured by what they call dramatic smoothing effects — that is, cars traveling at even speeds and accelerating/decelerating very slowly. With the average reaction time for braking at ~1.75 seconds, this is a task nearly impossible for humans but completely feasible for robotics.

Granted, today’s driverless cars and robotic vehicles aren’t completely capable of such a task yet either, but they’re getting there nonetheless. That’s because automated vehicles can not only react within fractions of a second but also potentially coordinate with each other to achieve extraordinary results.

Robot Cars and the Death of Traffic

A glimpse of a potentially traffic-less future comes from Peter Stone, a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin. Stone has designed a simulation for a lightless intersection, which, while dangerous-sounding, is actually quite efficient.

The reason for this level of efficiency is none other than constant communication. If all cars on the road know the intentions of the vehicles around them, reaction time essentially becomes negative. For all intents and purposes, automated traffic systems allow driverless cars to take a look into the future, while human drivers are acting around 1.75 seconds in the past.

As for the appropriate investing angle, there are several ways to play this, and play it you should. Lux Research expects the driverless car industry to reach $87 billion within less than 15 years — that’s not the kind of emerging market you want to ignore.

The most obvious companies to buy are those pioneering driverless vehicles and their components — companies such as Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Mobileye (NYSE: MBLY), the latter of which has sold off to attractive pricing in recent months.

But not all the revenue for the driverless industry is going to flow directly to the vehicles. As we’ve already discussed, there is enormous value in machine-to-machine communication (M2M) and traffic management software.

Ultimately, it’s algorithms — not just automobiles — that will drive this industry into the future, and these algorithms may even extend well beyond the application of autonomous cars.

A recent report from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, for instance, explains that the technology used to build self-driving cars may soon end up in robots for navigation purposes. These technologies include GPS, image recognition, and artificial intelligence, to name a few.

We’ll continue to cover these technologies and the opportunities they bring over the coming weeks and months, but for now it’s time to sign off.

Until next time,

Jason Stutman

Check us out on YouTube!