Vehicular traffic congestion is an extremely dangerous problem in urban areas, where transportation networks are becoming more complicated to design and execute. However, the apparent normal idea to build more roads in order to solve the traffic congestion can be sometimes quite a bad idea. The Braess’ paradox, which is a counter-intuitive phenomenon that can occur in transportation networks, states that under certain circumstances the addition of a new road to a traffic network can increase the travel times for all network users. This could impact the design of new traffic networks and the extension of existing ones. By utilizing Braess’ paradox, transportation planners can analyze the traffic flow situation in a road network before adding new roads as the redistribution of the traffic flow may increase the average travel time, and hence, making the traffic congestion even worse. This paper explains this phenomenon in order to avoid possible negative consequences resulting from the construction of new roads, since the capacity of the road networks of many cities has long been reached and space for the construction of new roads is limited.
Cite this paper
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