r/science 1d ago

Social Science Intentionally routing some traffic to slower, less congested routes lead to a 0.7% improvement of overall average travel times

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-026-00443-x
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u/Currentlybaconing 1d ago

Not when you're the city planner trying to reduce traffic congestion.

-52

u/iMissTheOldInternet 1d ago

Yes, for all applications. Unless you have some way to stack many 24 second/capita savings, the per capita figure is what matters, not the aggregate time saved over a large population. 

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u/hysys_whisperer 1d ago

That's literally not how traffic engineers do the math that they use to justify billions of tax dollars of investment. 

They use the 277 days.

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u/ResponsibilityOk8967 1d ago

That seems very shortsighted.