Resumen de Taking a detour improves traffic for everyone
Most drivers in urban areas try to find the fastest possible route to their destination. But when everyone does this, congestion increases and everyone suffers. If a handful of people took longer routes, they could cut overall congestion by 30 percent, says Serdar Colak of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Colak and his colleague Marta Gonzalez looked at millions of anonymous location-tagged mobile-phone records and matched them to roads in Boston, the San Francisco Bay area, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, and Lisbon and Port in Portugal. They noted that when drivers choose the shortest routes for themselves, commute times can lengthen by 50 per cent. Apps that suggest the shortest routes in real time make the problem even worse. But if a few cars take side roads, congestion reduces, saving each driver up to 3 minutes on average.
