Minimizing driver’s irritation at a roadblock

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 in [5] 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. PACS. 45.70.Vn Granular models of complex systems; traffic flow – 05.40.-a Fluc-tuation phenomena – 82.20.Mj Nonequilibrium kinetics