Minimizing driver's irritation at a roadblock

TL;DR

This paper models and minimizes driver irritation caused by roadblocks in urban traffic, extending existing models to include irritation and applying it to real-world rush hour traffic, revealing different optimal strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model that incorporates driver irritation into traffic flow optimization, extending previous models focused solely on waiting time.

Findings

Minimizing total waiting time differs from minimizing driver irritation in traffic strategies.

The model applied to real-world rush hour traffic shows different optimal traffic light strategies.

Driver irritation minimization can lead to more humane traffic management solutions.

Abstract

Urban traffic is a logistic issue which can have many societal implications, especially when, due to a too high density of cars, the network of streets of a city becomes blocked, and consequently, pedestrians, bicycles, and cars start sharing the same traffic conditions potentially leading to high irritations (of people) and therefore to chaos. In this paper we focus our attention on a simple scenario: We model the driver's irritation induced by the presence of a roadblock. As a natural generalization, we extend the model for the two one-way crossroads traffic presented by M.E. Fouladvand and M. Nematollahi to that of a roadblock. Our discrete model defines and minimizes the total waiting time. The novelty lies in introducing the (total) driver's irritation and its minimization. Finally, we apply our model to a real-world situation: rush hour traffic in Hillegom, The Netherlands. We observe that minimizing the total waiting time and minimizing the total driver's irritation lead to different traffic light strategies.