Going with the flow

DURHAM -- It can be seen every afternoon just by standing on the GO Train platform in Pickering: eastbound Hwy. 401 narrows and congestion increases.
   
“You see exactly the same pattern forming and there is nothing that could prevent this,” says Peter Berg.
   
An assistant professor in physics at UOIT, Dr. Berg is in fact working on research that seeks to do just that -- prevent traffic congestion from forming on 400-series highways.
   
“What we’ve been doing for the last few years now is basically looking at bottlenecks,” he said. “Bottlenecks can be things like speed reductions along a highway, which you find in construction zones for instance.”

Dr. Berg began to study traffic flow theory nearly 10 years ago, at about the time traffic was emerging as a field of research.
   
“It wasn’t understood for the longest time because no one was looking at any data,” he said. Then a decade ago, the first traffic theory emerged and Dr. Berg became interested in the study of highways -- those roads that have on and off ramps but no traffic lights.
   
It’s a hot topic, he says, as traffic congestion can be seen all over the world.
  
“It doesn’t matter if you have different drivers or drive on the left side or the right side, basically it’s the same everywhere you go,” he said. “The major problem is that during certain times of the day, traffic typically breaks down on those highways. This means that you either get the stop-and-go traffic that we all know or you slow down a lot to almost cycling speed.”
   
He says the cause of this congestion is complicated to understand, but it’s typically caused by too many vehicles entering the highway at the on ramps.
   
Seems logical, right? But Dr. Berg says the question that emerges is what can be done about it.
   
Although the traffic problem typically starts at an on ramp -- or other bottleneck situations, such as narrowing of lanes -- the congestion then moves upstream.
   
“We all experience this,” he said. “We are moving down the highway and we, all of a sudden, have to slow down. We move very slowly for about five minutes and then we can speed back up again. The problem was triggered maybe half an hour ago by an on ramp that is five or 10 kilometres downstream. It’s really fascinating.”
   
In Europe, researchers are working on projects that control how many cars enter the highway at one time to see if that will improve the overall travel time for commuters. Dr. Berg says the results show a dramatic improvement, even for those that are at first prevented from entering the highway.
   
“The goal of this research is to basically understand why those measures they’ve implemented in places like Holland and Germany are working,” he said. “On average, they’ve improved the traffic but why are they improving it? Can you show us some mathematical analysis?”
   
Dr. Berg’s research is looking at flow patterns and situations around bottlenecks. Ultimately, he would like to have a formula that could be put into place to control the traffic before it breaks down.
   
“That’s very challenging,” he said. “It’s very challenging to predict that if I do nothing, will traffic break down in three or four minutes.”
   
The problem is that traffic depends on many factors.
   
“It’s very difficult to even model traffic since there’s a lot of randomness associated with it: different drivers, different vehicles, different road conditions, different weather patterns,” he said. “The only thing you can do really is make average predictions.”
   
The necessity of solving this traffic conundrum, however, is becoming increasingly important. In the GTA, for instance, traffic is already a costly problem. The movement of people and goods is vital for productive business -- think of all those transport trucks moving goods  or the just-in-time delivery necessary for the manufacturing sector. A method that could help move these goods without impediment would save millions of dollars for local industry.
   
“The hope is to find a reasonable measure of controlling traffic around bottlenecks so that traffic doesn’t break down any longer,” Dr. Berg said. “That’s a huge task.”

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