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Excerpt from Critical Mass § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

A few years ago, Swiss economists Bruno Fey and Alois Stutzer announced the discovery of a new human foible, which they called “the commuters paradox.” They found that when people are choosing where to live, they consistently underestimate the pain of a long commute. This leads people to mistakenly believe that a mansion in the suburbs, with its extra bedroom and sprawling lawn, will make them happier, even if living there might force them to drive an additional 45 minutes to work. It turns out, however, that traffic is torture, and the big house isn’t worth it. According to the calculations of Fey and Stutzer, a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office.

While the concept of critical density has been repeatedly demonstrated using computer simulations—drivers are surprisingly easy to model as a system of interacting particles—it wasn’t until last year that this theory of traffic was experimentally confirmed. A team of physicists at Nagoya University wanted to see how many cars could maintain a constant speed of 19 mph around a short circular track. It turned out that the critical number was 22: Once that density was reached, tiny fluctuations started to reverberate around the track, which caused the occasional spontaneous standstill. As the scientists note, this is actually a pretty familiar scenario for particle physicists, who are used to studying phase transitions, such as the transformation of liquid water into solid ice. In this case, the critical threshold is temperature, which triggers clusters of molecules to slow down and form a crystal lattice, which then spreads to nearby molecules. A traffic jam is simply a solid made up of idling cars.

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