Cellphone data helps pinpoint source of traffic tie-ups

Thursday, December 20, 2012 - 14:30 in Mathematics & Economics

In most cities, traffic growth has outpaced road capacity, leading to increased congestion, particularly during the morning and evening commutes. In 2007, congestion on U.S. roads was responsible for 4.2 billion hours of additional travel time, as well as 2.8 billion gallons of fuel consumption and an accompanying increase in air pollution. One way to prevent traffic tie-ups is to have fewer cars on the road by encouraging alternatives such as public transportation, carpooling, flex time and working from home. But a new study — by researchers at MIT, Central South University in China, the University of California at Berkeley and the Austrian Institute of Technology — incorporates data from drivers’ cellphones to show that the adoption of these alternatives by a small percentage of people across a metropolitan area might not be very effective. However, if the same number of people, but from a carefully selected segment of the...

Read the whole article on MIT Research

More from MIT Research

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net