Found a simple recipe for getting rid of "traffic jams"

American scientists have found that unexpected traffic jams from scratch can be eliminated if all drivers maintain a distance not only from the car in front, but also in relation to all neighboring cars. As always, employees of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology distinguished themselves with an unexpected look at the problem.

The problem of many large cities, including Moscow, has long been traffic jams on the streets and highways, which arise for no apparent reason, and just as suddenly disappear for no apparent reason. There are no narrowings, no accidents, no difficult interchanges, but the cars are standing still. It turns out that our unwillingness to look around is to blame.

- A person is accustomed to literally and figuratively look ahead - it is extremely unnatural for us to think about what is happening behind or to the sides. However, if we think “comprehensively,” we can speed up traffic on the roads without building new highways and without changing infrastructure,” RIA Novosti quotes Liang Wang, an employee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Scientists have presented cars as a set of weights connected to each other by springs and vibration dampers. Such an approach, as the mathematicians explain, allows us to simulate a situation in which one of the cars starts to slow down abruptly, which forces the other cars to slow down to avoid a collision.

The result is a wave that travels through other machines and then fades away. When there are few such waves, the flow moves at a more or less uniform speed, and exceeding a certain critical level just creates a traffic jam. The fastest traffic jam spreads along the stream if the cars are unevenly distributed - some are close to those in front, some are far away.

It would be strange if the Americans did not offer something funny as a panacea for this particular problem, as well as for others. In our case, they state the following. Drivers need to maintain a distance in relation to neighboring cars, and potential pockets of traffic jams will not appear. But a person is not able to control all four directions of the world at the same time, so only a set of sensors and a computer can solve such a problem.

Welcome to the world of drones!