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Selfish Commuting, Redux

Networks guru Anna Nagurney (my kind host yesterday at Amherst), lends a valuable historical perspective in a letter in the Economist, in response to their article on routing inefficiencies in road networks.


SIR – It may be of interest to your readers to know that it was actually economists who first figured out that an individual’s selfish behaviour when selecting an optimal travel route would yield different traffic flows and times than if one were to assign flows in a centralised manner to try and minimise the cost to society (“Queuing conundrums”, September 13th). Arthur Pigou wrote “The Economics of Welfare” in 1920, by which time he was well aware of the distinction between different traffic behaviours.

Curiously, traffic and queuing problems keep on getting (re)discovered by different disciplines; now it seems to be the turn of the physicists.

Anna Nagurney
Director
Virtual Centre for Supernetworks
Isenberg School of Management
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, Massachusetts”

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This entry was posted on Saturday, November 15th, 2008 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Cities, Congestion, Roads, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Selfish Commuting, Redux”

  1. D42 Says:
    November 17th, 2008 at 1:29 am

    That’s the reason wqhy small mom & pop shops -always- fail to compete with the malls and large designers. Invariably, it is based around “individual” “vision”.. and invariably it crashes, and gets consumed by the larger

  2. michael webster Says:
    November 17th, 2008 at 10:05 am

    Tom, have I misunderstood your analysis? I thought that you had pointed out that a) sometimes the best way to reduce highway congestion was to allow the “free-riders” that zoom down either the entry lanes or even shoulders to converge back into traffic, but b) this solution really goes against the grain as well as not being a Nash equilibrium.

    At least this is what I tell everyone when I am recommending your book. Should I stop?

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

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