Studying for a Solution Holed up atop their desert mesa, where the biggest backup is two dozen cars idling at a red light on the serpentine, cliff-side road and rush hour lasts only half an hour, Barrett's band of physicists, chemists, mathematicians and computer theorists aims to revolutionize traffic forecasting and planning. They tapped the lab's Cold War experience in supercomputing and war-fighting models. Studies of wind currents during so-called nuclear winter laid the groundwork for forecasts of auto emissions. After Barrett joined the top-secret Los Alamos weapons lab in 1988, he did something he can't talk about. Lately, he's had his ear tuned to traffic.
Traffic constructs itself like a singer sings.
It's the same song. But everyday, the song is a little bit different. To capture the countless decisions that individual travelers make in shaping a metropolitan area's traffic patterns, Barrett's team is creating a vast, mirror world in cyberspace of every motorist and transit rider, every traffic light, turn lane and bus stop. They do this by simulating a region's population, mining census data and other statistics to create a mirror people with the same ages, incomes, jobs, children. This virtual population is turned out onto the cyber roads, trains and buses of a region modeled right down to the duration of red lights and the frequency of buses.