![]() In other words, increasing the number of lanes or the speed limit won’t have any effect on the overall capacity of the road. In most cases, these intersections are the limit to the maximum throughput of the roadway. We call this “interrupted traffic flow” for obvious reasons. Rather than ramps, overpasses, and access roads to control the flow of traffic, arterial roads use at-grade intersections through which only a few traffic streams can pass at a time. And, in between are the aptly-named arterial roadways, the medium-capacity connections between urban centers. Small collector roads are like the capillaries with not much capacity but a connection to every individual house and business. Highways are like the aorta with a high capacity and single major destination. There are a lot of good analogies between cities and human anatomy, and roadways are no exception. Over the years we’ve developed quite a few ways to manage this challenge of who gets to go and who gets to wait, from simple signs to roundabouts, but one of the most common ways we control the right-of-way at intersections is the traffic signal. One of the most fundamental of those challenges happens at an intersection, where multiple streams of traffic - including vehicles, bikes and pedestrians - need to safely, and with any luck, efficiently, cross each others’ paths. But, traffic management in dense urban areas is an extremely complex problem with a host of conflicting goals and challenges. When you’re stuck and sitting behind a long line of cars, it’s easy to let your mind wander over solutions to our traffic woes. All those idling vehicles have an impact on air quality. Traffic is not just frustrating, but it has consequences to the environment as well. In most cases, we just want to get where we’re going. In city driving, the journey is rarely better than the destination. If you live in a major city, I can take a pretty good guess at one of your most common frustrations: traffic.
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