Self-Organizing Behavior at W. Broadway and Grand
Reader Timothy writes in about the intersection of W. Broadway and Grand in Manhattan, “a notoriously noisy and difficult intersection.”
“This morning I watched for an hour while cars, trucks and pedestrians shared this space quietly…with civility!! little honking; no aggressive driving; no traffic cop.
Why? because the light was out.
No one had to speed up and honk to make the green light on time; no one honked or changed lanes to take advantage of the narrow window of time the light granted them. Everyone came to a stop, looked around, (wondering why the light was dead, and what they should do) and proceeded slowly thru.
Instead of a line of cars waiting for the light to change, alternate sides vying w/ each other for the few precious moments allowing them the right to pass thru….no one had to wait very long. And in fact the alternate sides traded back and forth, almost at a one-to-one ratio. No one had to wait, so no one got stuck in a line, so no one sped up, so no one honked, so there was no need for aggressive driving! even pedestrians got their due.
This is interesting (and hard to believe no one honked!), and I’ve heard things like before — newspaper accounts of how people felt, in blackouts and such, the traffic actually worked better. Or of how traffic police do a better job than lights (though the classic problem with police is coordinating intersections). Of course, it’s hard to really gauge things like flow from one’s own car, although sensing cooperative behavior is certainly possible. Whether it would last over a week or a month, instead of in a temporary situation, is another question. Still, one also hears, in those same blackouts, about the number of traffic accidents, and how they must be attributable to the blackout. Though this doesn’t explain the accidents on those days when the lights are functioning; but again, real data, as far as I can tell, is thin on the ground here.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 6:45 am and is filed under Congestion, Traffic Engineering. 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.
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March 5th, 2009 at 7:20 am
I’ve also noticed this in several places. There’s one very complex junction in particular that frequently has signal outages. It always seems to me that people continue to use the junction as if the lights were still operating - each queue tends to have its turn in the same order and duration as normal. However, I firmly believe that this is a temporary phenomenon - people are being cooperative in an unusual situation. If the signals were taken away altogether, I’d put money on complete chaos breaking out after a few days.
March 6th, 2009 at 7:24 am
After Hurricane Ike, it seemed like all of Houston (at least where I was trying to to go) had no traffic lights. At first everyone was very careful. Everyone cooperated; it was obviously an extraordinary event. However, as the weeks went on, commuters returned to work, and rush hour was a huge, aggravating ordeal. Some people got power back and began to expect everything to work, so they got impatient with the dwindling number of intersections that were still out - others still had no power and their stamina to endure yet another four way stop was running low. Fortunately by that time the police were able to step in at the busy intersections - they were definitely less friendly and less safe.
March 8th, 2009 at 5:29 am
I suspect that any change like this has a dramatic effect immediately. However, people get used to things quite quickly. Earlier this week I saw a video of driving conditions in Cairo. Few traffic lights, but terrible lane discipline and an awful lot of honking and really not a great place to be a pedestrian crossing the road.
March 8th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
Also, there may just be less people using the intersection.
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:19 pm
(sorry for the late comment; I’m catching up on the site)
I live in Chapel Hill, NC, which many describe as a cozy town. Alas, driving here is as bad as any gridlocked city. When storms knock out the power and the traffic signals are out, it’s every driver for themselves! What this means is that the drivers on main roads continue at full speed as if the traffic signals never existed, leaving drivers on the side streets to wait indefinitely for an opening. So much for cozy…