The Endless Delights of Traffic

Captains of ships are interested in storms. Living in Bangalore, I am interested in traffic. Both are agonizing and unescapable, although I suspect storms are a lot less frequent than the suffocating, slow-moving museum of human failings, that I grudgingly navigate every day.

This is probably true for all urban dwellers. I do remember my commutes from Hinjewadi to my home in Pune. In fact, that was the time when I, thanks to searches about traffic jams, pleasantly realized that a whole lot of study is done on traffic, or more generally, movement of things in and through constrained spaces and networks. Things like Braess’ Paradox blew my mind then. And later the application of Monte Carlo methods (which is basically simulating lots of events, lots of times) to it, made things like gridlocks and bottlenecks clearer.

The point is, traffic lends itself to a lot of different studies, both scientific and psychological, and sometimes, even art. Of course, there is no dearth of time for such pursuits if your commute goes through Marathahalli.

Maybe I will post more about traffic and it’s lessons. But for today, I will just be happy that I don’t take the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway to work.