Thursday, August 9, 2012

Free Market Traffic versus Government Traffic Control

Very cool. What happened when government traffic lights went out in Auckland,
New Zealand? See for yourself. The screen on the left shows the traffic flow when the lights were out.



Karen DeCoster, who posted the video at LRC, writes:
This caught my eye because I experience this often going to/from work. I take one surface road from my home to downtown, and things being the way they are in Detroit, when storms knock out traffic lights, it is typically at least one week before they get fixed. In the spontaneous order that results, I blaze through the lights much quicker, and my commuting time is always shortened.

The same day I first watched this video, last week, the traffic lights went out at a major intersection in the 'burbs where a six-lane divided highway crosses another six-lane divided highway (giving us the famous "Michigan Left"). This might seem a bit tricky to maneuver, however, I noted how carefully folks approached the intersection, and how quickly they made decisions to go/not go. Traffic flowed beautifully and I zipped through the intersection during evening rush hour.
Free the roads! Walter Block for DOT commissioner.

16 comments:

  1. How about Walter Block for DOT de-commissioner instead?

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  2. Incredible and breathtaking, if you understand what you're looking at.

    It's so tragic that most people on this planet don't realize how liberty could free them from not only the terrible crimes but the daily nuisances created by the horrifying State.

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  3. After seeing traffic light after traffic light spring up all over the cities in which I've lived over the years, I've often wondered if they keep installing these things to fatten cronies who do the contracting or to justify the salaries of the bureaucrats who manage this.

    Of course, there is also the more simple explanation: statists can't imagine people safely navigating the streets without their guidance.

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  4. This has to be one of the coolest videos I've ever seen. Thanks for sharing!

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  5. The design of the traffic light needs to change. It might have worked well on under utilized roads, but are clearly failing. The best design might just be blinking lights to warn of busy intersections, although there might be game theory solutions that would work better under controlled conditions.

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    1. Yet, sadly, there is no real incentive to do this. If the roads were private and road companies profited more for the volume of traffic their roads are able to route through as quickly and safely as possible, you'd surely see new innovation in intersection design.

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  6. A couple of years ago, lights went out on Constitution Avenue in DC. I approached an intersection and saw cars moving through the intersection in all four directions at once. Thus, at any time, there were cars in the middle of the intersection smoothly passing each other in four different directions. It was one of the most amazing things I have ever witnessed.

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  7. A truly empirical demonstration of economic principle.

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  8. I don't doubt that some sort of free market roads would work better than monopoly govt roads, but looking at that video above (which is really interesting) it looks like there is more volume on the day with electricity. Maybe it's just an illusion, but as I don't know details on the video could the smoother traffic have taken place on the weekend vs. the traffic jam on a weekday?

    As Karen notes, we have roundabouts, or as we call them, rotaries, here in the Northeast. They are very efficient and work very well as long as people aren't idiots and understand how to use them. Of course it came out a few years ago in the paper that Massachusetts has vowed to not build any more of them and slowly phase them out as they are too "uncontrolled and dangerous".

    One of these days I will find the time to read Walter's book, it sounds fascinating and I've been meaning to read it for a while.

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  9. Has anyone counted the number of cars in each side? I didn't see anything helpful in the YouTube description or comments.

    The volume of cars/minute would be interesting for comparison.

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    1. I counted cars entering from the left... 99 in the left-side video, 87 in the right-side, give or take a few.

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  10. Instead of wasting Dr. Block's talents at some useless government agency, how about we just end the dot??

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  11. What does this to do with a free market? Are you assuming a privately owned road wouldn't have traffic lights?

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    1. Personally, I wouldn't assume they'd have NONE. However, there would be a much stronger bias toward a) keeping traffic flowing, and b) safety. Traffic lights, as they are currently implemented in many cases, go against both of those.

      I assume that privately owned and operated roads would have the incentive to innovate with new solutions for A and B.

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  12. Don't forget that in the town of Bristol (in the UK) they engaged in an experiment whereby the city shut down the traffic signals on many intersections. It was apparently a success.

    Here's a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwHfibl1AoI

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    1. I should add that the video that I linked to gets quite a bit egalitarian towards the end, but that isn't the point.

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