Traffic Wouldn’t Jam If Drivers Behaved Like Ants (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Traffic Wouldn’t Jam If Drivers Behaved Like Ants (2016)

nautil.us

33 pointsdnetesn62 comments

Ants walk. They live near their necessities, and they move the entire colony/city, as a single unit, when the local economy goes bad. They only own what they can carry: their larvae and their next meal. Their payload ratio is legendary, but within the range of a bicycle + trailer. When there is a big problem, they physically band together to solve it.

We have so much to learn from the ants, but 2 ton personal vehicles, four lane city roads and a 1-2 hour daily commute, are not a part of that picture.

It also helps if you're light enough to be able to collide without injury.

So maybe we should have bumper cars that only move 25 miles per hour, and never stop except at their destination?

I could actually see that working in big cities.

Let's also reduce the mass of the vehicle, to a fraction of its payload. Then, let's have the user supply the energy from their own food supply. These improvements will also improve health, safety and space/cost/energy efficiency.

https://imgur.com/gallery/DAijq#qcfLWFs

Plastic safety bumper plates around the front seems like a good idea for this build. It might save a dog's life.

"They only own what they can carry"

Individual households in tightly packed neighborhoods EACH have garages full of items they only use a few times a year. Some may share, but communal living is hardly there.

Then we need more jobs and more factories to replicate more of those same random items (ladders, wasp spray, yard tools, etc) so that they be stored away and not shared. Then there is more traffic for people to get to work where they participate in production that goes largely unused.

The system has enabled far too much excess, and it's a collective educational issue.

>random items (ladders, wasp spray, yard tools, etc) so that they be stored away and not shared.

Are there any community sharing apps? So that I could loan out my ladder, etc.?

Make a facebook group for your neighborhood if you want, I suppose.

There's no way I'm loaning out my tools, equipment, or anything else I own except to people I trust very highly. I like my possessions to A) be readily available and B) in good working condition when I need them.

A reputation system might help alleviate those concerns; it might even result in your tools being better maintained. I've never tried a car-share, but the general idea seems legit.

The primary motive for you to join, would be the opportunity to use the best specialized tool for every job, every time. If not even that would convince you, then you must have a truly awesome lab/workshop, and therefore you are out of our league, so to speak. Congratulations on your success, I hope to see your work on Youtube.

There's a difference between belonging to a sort of tool club, and paying with both time and money to keep things going well, and loaning out my personal possessions. I've been thinking about joining a local makerspace specifically to get access to large tools I don't have space for right now, and I have no problem with that idea. That's no different from joining a gym, in principle. (That doesn't mean I prefer using communal tools. I means right now, that's what's best for my situation. Once I have space, I absolutely will be buying a lathe, mill, etc.)

However, there's a clear difference between that and loaning out my personal equipment. I would never belong to a car share because my car is an intensely personal possession. It doesn't sit bare and empty when I'm not driving it--I keep things in my car--and I never want it to be unavailable to me. And the same goes for my tools. Even something as simple as a ladder or a socket set is personal, when it's something you selected and bought yourself.

I wonder how many mechanics you know? Machinists? Other skilled tool-using professionals? Ask some of them how they feel about loaning tools sometime.

Yeah, this is all academic. What I am thinking of is basically a clean-room redesign of human civilization with little or no large vehicles, permanent structures or large population centers.

But, our bikes will need parts, and I am not willing to give up my laptop...

Yes, I wouldn't be loaning out my Bergeon lathe, but maybe the 99% of people who aren't machinists might be willing to contemplate loaning out their $30 aluminum step ladder to their neighbor for an afternoon? Or maybe not, but I'd be interested in trying it out.

http://www.ofrei.com/page_205.html

I'm not speaking hypothetically. I have loaned many tools, and many other possessions, to people in the past. Other people rarely treat my possessions with care, and sometimes they can't be bothered to return them unless I badger them. If I loan you a tool, and you not only don't return it in good shape and in a timely manner but make me come get it from you, I'm certainly not loaning you anything else.

There are certain things I just won't loan. Books? Hell no, unless they're textbooks. If I think someone would enjoy/benefit from reading a book, I'll buy them a copy. Tools? Probably not, unless it's about my third spare and I don't care if I lose it--and I'd probably just give it to them then. Vehicle? Maybe, depending who they are, but I'm more likely to just give them a ride. And of course, that's the thing, isn't it... I'd rather help someone myself than just hand them my gear and wish them luck. And I have done so many times in the past, though I am becoming more selective about who gets my time.

Liability is not to be ignored either. Loan someone a ladder they're too clueless to use properly and you might find yourself getting sued. Besides the fact that I don't want someone else wandering off with my $300 Werner multiposition ladder--sorry, I don't have a crappy ladder I keep around just to loan out--the thing is not exactly foolproof to use. 16 feet off the ground is not the best time to realize you didn't lock the pivot correctly. I wouldn't let someone whose competence I was not sure of just borrow a chainsaw, motorcycle, or firearm either.

FWIW I don't like borrowing things myself either. I've broken friends' possessions before and even though I fixed/replaced them, it's still an awful feeling breaking someone else's stuff.

Here are some opinions and experiences related to loaning tools, if you're interested:

http://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=37765

http://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=355714

It's interesting that the 2009 thread had a lot more people who were happy to loan tools, and who had good experiences doing so, than the 2017 thread. That mirrors my experience with loaning things to and generally helping people over the last decade.

One option is to use the infinite garage of https://craigslist.com

>They only own what they can carry

Aphids?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071009212548.h...

Dogs and chickens, I forgot about them, but with safe slow traffic, your dog can tag along. With a special purpose compartment on the bike trailer, you could bring ~4 chickens, and have a couple fresh eggs every morning, wherever you happen to be. Home is wherever you can inflate your bed; your party only moves forward, never returns.

Perhaps someone should specialize to handle sheep and goats. If you want deer or bison, then form a hunting party, and then trade 100s of kilos of sausages for your kid's first bike-trailer-home.

The problem is that what is most efficient for getting a car from point a to b is not what is best for society overall.

There are many articles online where people on residential streets got flooded with traffic because of apps like waze.[1]

In the valley we only seem good at solving single isolated problems, and we are remarkably tone deaf to the effects these 'disruptions' have on the rest of society.

1. http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/shortcut-app-waze-1.346300...

A good argument can be made that using the residential streets is best for "society overall." The amount it disrupts those who live in the neighborhood could very well be outweighed by a large reduction of wasted time by all those stuck in a traffic jam.

Streets are made for driving upon. If people don't like people driving on their streets, they should vote to get rid of them.

To boot, most people in those neighborhoods SHOULD be going to work anyways, so they shouldn't notice people going up and down their streets for the most part. We haven't hit Japan's retirement-age population level problem, yet.

Don't tell people what they should do. Maybe they work from home, maybe they don't work at all, what the heck does work ethic have to do with it?

"Don't tell people what they should do."

The pure irony of your statement.

There is no irony[1]. I never told people not to use waze, just pointed out the consequences of doing so at scale on existing political arrangements made in society.

1. Perhaps hypocrisy, is the word you really meant. Nobody knows what irony means anymore.

Hypocrisy and Irony are very closely linked hand-in-hand, so closely in fact that the words can effectively be substituted for each other in this instance. It is hypocritical for someone to tell me to not tell someone what to do (and in fact, my 'telling someone what to do' was a suggestion, since voting is not a mandatory thing in the USA where I post from) since they are doing the same thing in effect, and it is ironic since they are effectively performing the very behavior they're wanting me to not do.

I had the last vestiges of a 'good' education, where one could use good logic to explain the usage of a word not commonly used in such a manner. I attended the 4th best independent school district in the nation at the time. That district no longer exists and hasn't in true form for over 20 years. The students are now meth and heroin addicts. My hometown has the title of heroin capital of the USA because the amount of black tar exceedingly overwhelms the COMBINED shipments (calculated) of powder and crack cocaine FOR THE NATION, and has done this consistently since it was featured on Channel One news twenty years ago.

Still no irony, sorry. Nor hypocrisy either.

Your initial comment is being down-voted, perhaps because your post contained an irrelevant prescription for what people should do, and a broad generalization of what streets are 'for'.

Should we all consider the matter settled now that you have told us what streets are for, and informed us that we should all be working?

"a broad generalization of what streets are 'for'"

Streets are designed for the flow of traffic. There has never been any other reason. Source: Former Memphis Civil Engineer.

and I didn't mean should as in "Mandatory" but as in "should be at work at this point and time given typical work days."

But people seem to be too quick to voice their opinion with a click instead of vocalizing it. Oh, yet here on the front page is an article trying to espouse the very virtue of LETTING SOMEONE SPEAK.

That's pretty backwards and pathetic.

Well, they still need streets, so getting rid of them isn't really a solution.

But you just gave me a great idea, inner-city toll roads. Reduces traffic on protected streets and Waze gets to implement a slider how many $ your willing to spend on your shortcuts.

Can they just put up signs that say "No thru traffic"?

That's the same sort of thing as making them useless for through traffic with bollards but is cheaper (and maintains convenience for the residents).

I'd argue the harm to a neighbourhood street far outweighs the needs of people in cars.

It creates noise, discourages kids from playing outside, basically it decreases the quality of life generally when the street you live on becomes a river of traffic.

Basically, this new innovation disrupts a balance that has been achieved incrementally over time.

Go into any neighbourhood and talk to people and you will find that over time they have called the city councillor spoken to each other to come to an agreement about how their street is to be used, from parking issues, to street furniture to common access to some areas such as school parking lots off hours for example.

Some of these agreements are formal, others informal and unspoken, but they always exist.

I don't buy your argument that waze, by optimizing for a single variable, and which ignores all of these agreements between residents can be a greater benefit 'overall.'

Also, by solving the congestion problem this way, they actually divert attention away from proper solutions being implemented at the city level.

This idea that local residents are more entitled to the street becomes problematic, though.

I live in a high-rise condo on a busy arterial road in the city centre. Should my enjoyment of the street override the needs of suburbanites to commute to work daily? I might think so, but somehow I don't think the suggestion that we should force thousands of people onto public transit or bicycles or whatever is going to wash.

So then the question becomes, why are people in certain neighbourhoods entitled to things that people in other neighbourhoods clearly are not entitled to? If others can use "my" street when they please, why can't I do the same on "their" street?

> In the valley we only seem good at solving single isolated problems...

I'd suggest that's precisely because that's how engineers are taught to solve problems (and not just in the valley). Reduce a problem to it's simplest representation (by abstracting everything else away) and solve.

Then maybe that's why these problems were solved in the past by more than just engineers, city planners, politicians individual residents etc...

Right - not just an engineer-agent of the marketing dept

The solution to the neighborhood problem is to make it impossible for a car to use those roads as through streets. Basically you put up a bunch of bollards, so people can still walk and bike through a neighboorhood, but cars would only use the roads to get to a specific destination in that neighborhood. There's a word for this layout, I can't think of it - with the bollards in place, it turns the neighborhood into a maze of hard right and left turns. It's totally pointless to find a work around (in a car).

Portland has aggressively pursued traffic calming and these traffic shaping measures you discuss. I first thought it was brutal and everyone drive really slow. On residential streets, both sides almost always allow forstreet parking, and so the roads don't allow for two way traffic. On other roads they narrow the lanes a lot, using bollards or increasing shoulder.

They realize that traffic is a social engineering problem and not a highway engineering one.

Now I love it. I drive slower when it makes sense to, and I do so because it's what feels right at the slice of road I'm on, not because of the sign that says the max speed.

Ants are physically incapable of getting into "anto-accidents" though, and they are not physically relegated to a thin, poorly maintained, and often at times, poorly planned/engineered, two dimentional ribbon that does not have their best route at heart.

Cars are only like ants in that they are discrete objects moving along set paths, but similarity in capability ends there.

Every car has a completely different universe of goals, objectives, plans, destinations, etc from each other and they lack the ability to communicate, inform,or teach other cars anything.

Further, ants do not posses the ability to get frustrated with heavy ant traffic triggering ant-rage, they simply re-route as required.

Humans driving cars can act irrationally based on nearly infinite input possibilities...

Autonomous vehicles driven by AI which mimics ant movement logic can do well for traffic, but so long as a human consciousness is directing the vehicle... not going to get better any time soon.

Yeah, the maximum momentum of an ant is less than the speed at which suddenly stopping (i.e. impact with any other object) causes damage. An ant probably doesn't even have minor injuries in its normal operation, including any impacts with other ants or objects.

Also, pedestrians and cyclists and motorcyclists aren't ants. Some other metaphor would apply to them, and they can be damaged by the "ant" (a car) a lot easier.

But I think the most important difference is ants are cooperative rather than competitive; ants don't get pissed, whereas primates seem to require becoming irate occasionally even for no good reason.

Street automobiles are essentially limited to 1 dimensional ribbon not 2D. To get 2D you need wilderness and ATVs, or a horse.

Also look at their performance stats, zero to 90% of top speed is a good fraction of a minute in my commuter car whereas for an ant its about a footstep ditto turning performance.

A better analogy to ant behavior than car driving would be humans wandering about a park, perhaps one of the concerts in the park series that I attend. Or maybe humans wandering about a uni campus or around a sporting event. Or a riot.

Many have commented on how well ants cooperate. Well, not all species cooperate across nests and some of the more predator like ants are kinda brutal to smaller insects.

Likewise humans part of the same "family" like a large military convoy seem to cooperate reasonably well.

> Street automobiles are essentially limited to 1 dimensional ribbon not 2D.

Well...a graph of 1D ribbons, connected in such a way as to approximate 2D.

The problem isn't training people to behave like ants for efficiency reasons. That shouldn't be difficult. The problem is people not planning ahead which translates to slamming on the brakes to make a lane change to exit, not speeding up quickly enough to merge smoothly with traffic which translates to the braking shockwave effect on the cars behind them, and finally, people's self-serving attitudes that translate to cutting other people off/weaving in and out of lanes/not letting others merge/etc.

TL;DR - This has been rehashed over and over but the same results are these: Ants do what is best for the colony. People do what is best for themselves.

And with well-designed self-driving cars, pretty soon they will.

Assuming each self-driving company doesn't implement adversarial behavior, only cooperating with their own kind. This would both help reinforce the benefits of operating at scale and give their vehicles faster than average speeds. Interesting times ahead once we transition to self-driving more fully.

I would imagine if car vendors were creating cars that intentionally cut off or slow down their competitors the regulators would step in and do what they do best... regulate.

Sure, but let's say it would be globally optimal to slow down and let you in. You could imagine this only being done for cars of the same brand, which is different than explicitly attacking competitors. Regulation is likely that answer, but I have my doubts that "behaving like ants" will be the default behavior.

Ants only know about problems at the location that previous ants encountered them. That is, they can't look ahead to problems, and can only report when coming back over a path.

A good example of this is the ant colony in a Polish nuclear bunker - the ants consistently fall into a ventilation pipe, because there's no pheromone warning signal of the dangerous fall.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/09/bizarre-ant-colony-d...

And as a side-effect, there's an ant colony with no queen, no larvae, no males, but a continual supply of adult workers.

At some point all the cars physically don't fit on the road. (Especially keeping safe distances between them)

At that point no behavior would eliminate traffic.

This article reminds me of: If my grandmother had wheels she would be a bike

If everyone started driving the moment they saw the light turn green, the collective traffic would move forward like a train. Granted, there needs to be a buffer zone between each car. But that zone often gets diminished because everyone wants to drive until they have to stop behind someone, rather than driving while looking ahead at the traffic sequence.

The tortoise/hare metaphor is relevant here: sometimes slowing down without braking within a couple hundred yards of an intersection can get you through quicker (and use less energy). The idea is to avoid complete stops (sometimes inevitable).

But there are attitudes in mental software that must be modified. "I'm in a hurry and I have to get there RIGHT NOW." "Everyone is in MY way."

Individualism can be an inefficiency of the collective, and that will be a tough lesson to teach.

'But there are attitudes in mental software that must be modified. "I'm in a hurry and I have to get there RIGHT NOW." "Everyone is in MY way."

Individualism can be an inefficiency of the collective, and that will be a tough lesson to teach.'

Indeed, all you need to do is rewrite human nature.

>If everyone started driving the moment they saw the light turn green, the collective traffic would move forward like a train.

Yes and we would all have to maintain the same following distance all the time.

I know there are some people that do like to follow me at the same distance regardless of whether I'm stopped or I'm going 65mph, but I am going to change my follow distance of cars in front of me depending on my driving speed.

You can't have a seamless flow of traffic and a safe speed dependent following distances.

The issue isn't that humans don't behave like ants. The issue is that we have an aversion to public/shared transportation and promote commuting as a given.

Personal car culture needs to die for traffic to be reduced. For that to happen we need better transportation options for rural areas or more remote-work opportunities.

Sounds good in theory, but there are limits to transit. You need a fairly high population density, and shared destinations.

I have never worked in an office where the bus schedule allowed taking it - if I got the first by in and the last bus out I would have worked 7:45 - not a full 8 hour day before you consider a long lunch which is nice at times. Other offices the nearest bus stop was 3 miles away (along a route that was not walker friendly)

Sure if you live in an apartment and work downtown public transit works great. However engineering companies tend to not be downtown because rent is so high.

Why do you assume people embrace "personal car culture" just because there's a lack of public transportation? People like having their own vehicles. It's freedom and independence.

Even if I lived right on a bus line, and my workplace was on that same line, I would still drive or ride a motorcycle to work (or bike, if it was close enough I suppose). I got well over being on the bus's schedule by my senior year of high school and I have no interest in going back to that.

I do absolutely agree we need more remote work options but that's up to employers, and they don't seem to like the idea much in general, so... not holding my breath.

> It's freedom and independence

This is why I assume people embrace it. Is it really freedom and independence when 90% of your time spent in the car is in traffic to get to work and home?

Freedom to me is not wasting 5-10 hours a week on getting to work, unpaid. Even if that means sacrificing my 'freedom' to drive around the countryside on weekends.

I don't see how having a long commute somehow diminishes the benefits of having a personal vehicle. For most people, having a personal vehicle means, partly, being able to live where they want instead of having to choose a home based on accessibility to public transportation, or alternately, to be able to take a job that may be lucrative but totally inaccessible by public transportation. A personal vehicle offers a good deal of flexibility and antifragility that I think you're ignoring here, given the way the real world is set up.

And perhaps all you do is drive around the countryside on the weekend, but that is hardly the only use for a personal vehicle. At least half the really interesting things I've done in my life would not have been possible without my own vehicle.

"Behaved Like Ants". You mean walked everywhere? traveled at speeds that make collisions irrelevant? Without regard for trespassing? And be so immune to terrain barriers as to be able walk upside down?

Ants really just have more choices for paths than they need.

What if ants drove cars, would they still avoid accidents? Or is the problem different at scale?

Ants also climb over each other from time to time: something a car is not recommended to do.

Yes, in the example of ants and citronella, slower is better if you care about overall suffering. But faster is much better if you care about your suffering AND if you happen to quit the room before the jamming starts.

Ants aren't big enough that inertia matters and have zero turning radius.

Yeah but we aren't ants, we're primates. And primates are either equally competitive to cooperative or perhaps slightly more so competitive. Ants don't compete, they only cooperate.

Sure, but what is an ant going to do with the time it saves by cutting in line?

Sorry, when I drive I can only look out for myself.

Ants drive manual transmissions and humans are getting cars that do more of the thinking for them(?)

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