I swear I was discussing exactly this sort of simulation with my brother as both of us wondered how many city planners model the changes they are making to the road networks before pumping millions into projects that dump traffic from one point to another. Additionally, it'd be interesting to simulate the cascading effect of traffic violations like bad parkings, straddling lanes.
in nyc it's quite common (maybe even required) to run simulations of changes of infrastructure before making them to see how they will effect traffic.
source: my partner helps run these simulations as part of their job/their company gets contract work from the city all the time to check changes of bus routes/etc.
I've had some trouble getting in touch with the engineers who did this around Seattle. Any details they can share about the software they use, what metrics they base decisions on, where they pull demand data? Any thoughts on making the input and results of these simulations public so anybody can reproduce the analysis, experiment on their own, etc?
I've been thinking for a while now about building a system like this. There is one particular set of traffic lights on my commute which causes 45-60 minute delays at peak times. I've wondered how some small changes to timings of the light might reduce some of that, and was thinking about building something to simulate it and test my theory.
The other thing that is interesting about traffic patterns is how truly connected the entire network of roads are. You can have a collision on a major road which has a big impact on roads several miles away. I've always thought it would be fun to visualize that somehow, to determine not just the immediate effects of a change to a road system, but how it effects other commuter routes.
Definitely going to play around with this. Kudos to the author.
The professional simulators are prohibitively expensive for individuals to play around with, sadly. I had the chance to try VISSIM recently, and the UI was overwhelming -- the general public would never casually learn to use something that intricate. I'm trying to strike a balance between the heavy-duty simulation packages and existing city sim games -- something with a good approximation of a real city by default, and something that's very easy for anybody to pick up.
Agreed - I used VISSIM for some work in a university transportation research lab, and it was very interesting after learning how to use it - but both expensive and very intricate to learn. It even supports other types of transportation, like rail networks. It would be great to have a simplified version or some kind of middle ground to help people understand these complex systems.
Kudos to Dustin for working on this.