By Travis Loller
Associated Press

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — As millions of people travel the interstates this Thanksgiving, many will encounter patches of traffic at a standstill for no apparent reason — no construction or accident. Researchers say the problem is you.

Human drivers just don’t do a good job of navigating dense traffic conditions, but an experiment using artificial intelligence in Nashville recently means help could be on the way. In the experiment, specially equipped cars were able to ease rush hour congestion on Interstate-24, researcher Daniel Work said. In addition to lessening driver frustration, Work said less stop-and-go driving means fuel savings and, by extension, less pollution.

The professor of civil and environmental engineering at Vanderbilt University is one of a group of engineers and mathematicians from universities around the U.S. who have been studying the problem of phantom traffic jams after a simple experiment in Japan a dozen years ago showed how they develop. Researchers there put about 20 human drivers on a circular track and asked them to drive at a constant speed. Before long, traffic went from a smooth flow to a series of stops and starts.

“Phantom traffic jams are created by drivers like you and me,” Work explained.

One person taps the brakes for whatever reason. The person behind them takes a second to respond and has to brake even harder. The next person has to brake even harder. The wave of braking continues until many cars are at a standstill. Then, as traffic clears, the drivers accelerate too quickly, causing more braking and yet another jam.

“We know that one car braking suddenly can have a huge impact,” Work said.

The recent experiment showed that a few cars driving slowly and steadily could have an impact as well, for the better.

The experiment utilized 100 cars that travelled in loops on a 15-mile section of I-24 from about 6 a.m. to 9:45 a.m. each morning. Working on the premise that if 5% of the cars on the road were acting together, they could lessen the prevalence of phantom traffic jams, the researchers equipped those 100 cars to communicate wirelessly, sending traffic information back and forth.

They also took advantage of the adaptive cruise control that is already an option on many new vehicles. This technology lets the driver set a car to cruise at a certain speed, but the car automatically slows down and speeds up as needed to keep a safe distance from the car in front. In the experiment, the adaptive cruise control was modified to react to the overall traffic flow — including what was happening far ahead — using artificial intelligence.

The cars’ decision-making occurred on two levels, Work said. At the cloud level, information about traffic conditions was used to create an overall speed plan. That plan was then broadcast to the cars, which used artificial intelligence algorithms to determine the best action to take. The researchers were able to evaluate the effect the connected cars had on morning traffic flow using a special 4-mile stretch of I-24 outfitted with 300 pole-mounted sensors.

The experiment is a project of the CIRCLES consortium, a group that includes several automakers and the U.S. Energy and Transportation departments. Other lead researchers are based at the University of California, Berkeley; Temple University; and Rutgers University-Camden.

Liam Pedersen is deputy general manager for research at Nissan, a CIRCLES consortium partner who was in Nashville for the experiment. He said one of the exciting things about it is that it builds on technology that is already in many new cars.

“This is not autonomous driving,” he said. “This is something we could realize very soon.”

Asked if automakers will be willing to cooperate to ease traffic, Pedersen said, “I certainly hope so, because the system works best when lots and lots of cars participate.”

The experiment built off one Work and his colleagues conducted in 2017 at the University of Arizona. That repeated the Japanese experiment, this time with a single self-driving car thrown into the mix. The self-driving car smoothed the flow of traffic so that there was 98% less braking. That led to a 40% increase in fuel efficiency and a 14% increase in distance driven.

Researchers are still crunching the numbers on their most recent experiment, but Work said it “demonstrated that these jams can be reduced through the novel automated vehicle technologies we developed. It’s unquestionable that enhanced automotive technology can significantly reduce phantom traffic jams when implemented at scale.”

Still, he cautioned that the technology is not going to suddenly eliminate congestion.

“When there are more cars on the road than the road can support, there will always be traffic,” he said. “But this can make that congestion less painful.”

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Portlanders know congestion. The city is consistently ranked among the major American metropolitan areas with the worst traffic. But many observers don’t realize the city’s congestion is deeply tied to the rest of the state.

Not only does Portland traffic “cascade” down to smaller outlying communities, congestion here slows the flow of business around Oregon. Meanwhile, traffic planners say many communities have outgrown their road systems.

The effects of rural congestion are seen in rises in fuel consumption, trip times, accident rates, and delayed freight deliveries. Leaders will soon look at how federal air quality money is allotted in rural communities to ease congestion, and a long-discussed transportation funding package could also bring relief.

Sweet relief

It’s not your imagination – traffic really is getting worse in the Portland area, planners say. Part of this is the resurgent economy and resultant explosive population growth. Registered vehicles and drivers increase year over year. As well, the closure of Terminal 6 at the Port of Portland has spilled freight haulers onto Oregon’s highways. Local government leaders confirm this, as do aerial images of trucks stopped in the Columbia River Gorge during recent harsh winter weather.

“It’s quite striking,” Oregon Sen. Betsy Johnson, D-Scappoose, said.

Johnson was a member of the bipartisan committee empaneled by Gov. Kate Brown last year to travel around the state and speak with citizens about transportation ahead of the 2017 legislative session. Brown is hoping to see this Legislature pass the first major transportation funding package since 2009.

Across Oregon, committee members heard a common refrain.

“There was a lot of interest all across the state in addressing some of our major congestion choke points, from residents and companies that ship products from our farms and forests and factories to markets across the nation and the world,” said Travis Brouwer, assistant director for public affairs at the Oregon Department of Transportation.

ODOT has noticed “significant” congestion issues pop up in rural communities, according to Brouwer. One example is in Yamhill County, where the road system wasn’t built to accommodate the heavy vehicle traffic now gripping the small communities of Dundee, Newberg and McMinnville. ODOT and its contractors are now in the process of – the largest road project in the state. Completion is scheduled for this year.

“By routing truck traffic away from the downtown, they can actually have a more livable community and reclaim their downtown,” Brouwer said.

The agency is also interested in adding lanes in the mountains of Southern Oregon for slow, climbing trucks – they can create congestion and danger when mixed with lighter vehicles traveling around 70 mph.

Peak times

Along Interstate 5 to the south, bottlenecks in the Salem and Eugene areas slow freight travel and regularly cascade onto other highways and local streets, impacting those communities.

Keizer Mayor Cathy Clark said this has led to more traffic at peak times, and longer peak times.

“With our growing population and increased density, it has definitely gotten worse over time,” said Clark, chairwoman of the Salem-Keizer Metropolitan Population Organization, one of about 10 such transportation groups in Oregon. “Recently, with our ice and snow, we saw our vulnerability. We’re seeing that it doesn’t take much to cascade our system into some pretty severe congestion issues.”

MPOs are units of local government that identify and prioritize transportation projects for consideration for state and federal funding. The Federal Highway Administration recently altered its criteria for the dispersal of Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) dollars – an important source of funding for congestion-related projects.

And given President Donald Trump’s pledges to pass a massive infrastructure package early in his term, MPOs are excited about the possibility of checking long-needed projects off their lists.

“It’s a whole new ball game,” Clark said.

To win CMAQ dollars, MPOs have learned to tack multimodal features to road projects to stand out.

In Medford, the upcoming, partially-CMAQ-funded Foothill Road improvement project – converting a major two-lane arterial road to four – will feature sidewalks and separated bicycle lanes.

Though Medford hasn’t seen the same population growth as the rest of the surrounding Rogue Valley, many of the region’s jobs and services are located in the city, which has become more crowded during the day, according to Cory Crebbin, public works director since 1999.

“This department’s philosophy has been: We can’t build our way out of congestion, because everyone wants to use the streets at the same couple hours of the day,” Crebbin said. “You can’t build a big street for all those people and have it sit vacant for those 22 hours a day.”

But people do get frustrated, so to combat congestion Medford is looking at adding multimodal infrastructure, to provide commuters with a choice.

“Our theory is that if you provide the bike lanes and the sidewalks so that they have alternatives for their trip, they’d be less frustrated because they’re making a choice,” Crebbin said.

Community crises

MPOs have to carefully spread dollars around to combat congestion – intersection and signal projects to bicycle/pedestrian projects to transit purchases like buses and sidewalk shelters.

Often, reducing congestion can be done without touching the roads. Signal timing can be synchronized better. Many rural communities are bolstering transit and bicycle-pedestrian options to encourage more people to not drive. And even raising and lowering speed limits or buying new buses can have a big impact.

“Even an extra turning lane can make it flow better,” said Mike Jaffe, chairman of the Mid-Willamette MPO.

CMAQ dollars have helped pave dirt streets in Medford and Klamath Falls.

Klamath Falls is uniquely susceptible to poor air quality because it’s located at the bottom of a valley and many of its residents still favor wood-burning stoves.

Klamath Falls City Manager Nathan Cherpeski is hopeful that a new funding formula will help the city maintain compliance with federal air quality laws – a genuine challenge in the past.

Around 100 people are moving to Portland each day, and traffic planning has not kept pace, said Clackamas County Commissioner Paul Savas, who’s outspoken on the issue of congestion bottlenecks in his county. He says we’ve outgrown our transportation system, just as we’ve outgrown our housing.

“We simply don’t have the capacity; we can’t keep up,” he said. “It’s a recipe for poverty, and here we have homelessness at a record high as well. This isn’t something to be proud of.”

The impact on travel times and business is affecting the state’s ability to add and retain jobs, he said.

“They say, for every crisis, there’s an opportunity,” he said. “And I think that we are at a crisis level with the congestion and it’s unprecedented.”

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