Does following optimized routes for single cars improve car routing?

Abstract

We study the impact of deserting a pre-established path, determined by a navigation software, on the overall city traffic. To do so, we consider a cellular automaton model for vehicular traffic, where the cars travel between two randomly assigned points in the city following three different navigation strategies based on the minimization of the individual paths or travel times. We found, in general, that, above a critical car density, the transport improves in all strategies if we decrease the time that the vehicles persist in trying to follow a particular strategy when a route is blocked, namely, the mean flux increases, the individual travel times decrease, and the fluctuations of density in the streets decrease; consequently, deserting helps prevent traffic jams.

Obscuring digital route choice information prevents delay-induced congestion

“…However, this notion is controversial as providing information about the travel time is not necessarily beneficial for the overall state of the system and may even increase congestion [1][2][3][4][5][6] , for example, if the available information is imperfect 7 . Specifically, it has been shown from a systemic perspective that selfish routing may lead to non-optimal collective states in which the travel time averaged across all vehicles is higher than the theoretical optimum 6,[8][9][10][11] . Furthermore, unpleasant side-effects exist, such as increased usage of low-capacity roads through residential areas, use of complicated routes with higher accident risk, and increased noise and air pollution [12][13][14] .…”