Infrastructures strain at ever more cars arriving on the road.
Traffic problems can stem from cars slowing or stopping, sometimes in response to accidents. Yet the more usual cause is simply too many people wanting to be in the same place at the same time. Limitations in the road system or minor inconsistencies in the behavior of drivers can then compound to cause torturous slowdowns. Past methods of predicting traffic patterns relied on statistical models that treated traffic as a homogeneous fluid, ignoring differences between individual drivers. Sections of transportation networks were often analyzed in a vacuum, without regard for the interactions between the components.