how does increasing the length of a road help with traffic jam?

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I was watching a civil engineer’s video where he mentioned that in some cases where there’s a traffic jam but no space to widen the road or increase lanes, engineers resort to making the road longer and/or decreasing the speed limit. How does that help?

My first thought was that it acts as a buffer but since it’s still the same road technically, the cars entering and exiting is still the same therefore the buffer would eventually be filled up and the bottleneck will pop up again.

Edit: for more context. The road is a 2-lane highway in a game video (cities skylines 2) which has no traffic light and only 1 or 2 exit ramps at the end into the city.

In: Engineering

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

You are adding more room on the road for cars, but keeping the same amount of cars. Instead of having 1,000 cars in 1 mile of road you will have 1,000 cars in 2 miles of road. That being said if there is a choke point at the end of the road it can still back up.

I too watch RCE

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