Science

Traffic Zoology

Learn Science on mps-science.com. Traffic Zoology article will help answer your questions on Science.We at mps-science.com specialize in Science. Science at mps-science.com provides the most up to date news and articles. If you have questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

Once the racers sort themselves out - after ten to twenty laps - it is common to see a single draft line of four to seven cars running in front, pursued a hundred or so yards back by a se

There is a secret zoo that runs encaged abeam the roads.

They are liquid, semi-visible goliaths that rage through the streams and chunks of ordinary traffic, with the effervescent tendrils of mile-long tales whipping next them like Chinese dragons. Though composed of hundreds of pounds of steel, glass and plastic, they are able to pass through solid objects. They are end by the laws of the highway, but not by any conventional notion of time or space.

They are put together Traffic Animals: a menagerie of emergent animality drawn from the interacting behaviours of many individual human beings driving many individual cars with many individual goals, their combined commerce giving rise to something with greater presence, power and purpose than the sum of its constituents. They take on a host of different forms, each to serve a different end.

They are real, and they drive from us.

Preamble

In his introduction to The Extended Phenotype (Oxford University Press, 1982) enthusiastic evolutionary biochemistry cheerleader and Commodore-hacking pop-science guru Richard Dawkins invites us to consider the Necker Cube Illusion: a two-dimensional image representing two interlocked three-dimensional top in which the foreground and incident can seem to flip back and forth as the efferent neuron fruitlessly seeks the "true" interpretation of the depicted space. This is Dawkins' starting point for a thought experiment in which he blurs the lines midst species, their genes and the environment, lodestar into question the traditional outskirts drawn through animate systems to identify the relevant level of study. To wit, to wank:

We look at life and go ahead by seeing a dole of interacting individual organisms. We know that they contain smaller units, and we know that they are, in turn, parts of larger composite units, but we fix our gaze on the whole organisms. Then suddenly the image flips. The individual bodies are still there; they have not moved, but they seem to have gone transparent...

In other words, if you are able to de-emphasise the organism itself you are free to swim in the idea of enthusiast ponds as goody-goody lakes generated by whiskers genes, or to see a spider's web as an string orchestra of silk drawn by DNA. By extending the lines with which we corral the traditional phenotype, we define new organisms, merging technology and individuals into communities the same way that waning micro-organisms interacting inside bilipid membranes fell into symbiotic lockstep dances to found the first stable cells.

Organelles, cells, bodies, herds: at which level we discern the viper is purely a matter of focus.

This idea of the emergent concupiscent or "super-organism" is hardly particular to Dawkins: William Morton Wheeler remarked on the idea in his 1911 paper "The Ant nationality as an Organism" in a treatment that is every bit as valid but with considerably less otaku chic than Kevin Kelly's printed-soundbyte manifesto on hive complexity, Out of Control (Perseus Books, 1994). In the words of Kelly:

There is nothing to be found in a beehive that is not submerged in a bee. And yet you can search a bee forever with cyclotron and fluoroscope, and you will never find a hive.

So too can you examine a driver in a car and know nothing upwards of the greater armadillo in which they both participate when the total environment are right. Some of the manipulable forces can be seen most forsooth in the rarified environment of the professional race course, as explored by David Ronfeldt, a senior social scientist at RAND, in his 2002 paper Social Science at 190 MPH on NASCAR's master Superspeedways, where fleeting moments of co-operation needle rivals are necessary in order to win. Ronfeldt focuses in particular on the phenomenon of draft line formation, which is similar to the way flocking livestock can share steaming advantage. Like iron filings in a magnetic field, the large-scale distribution of opportunistically partnering cars are drawn into predictable macro-scale patterns confronting the speedway:

Once the racers sort themselves out - next ten to twenty laps - it is sleazy to see a single draft line of four to seven cars running in front, pursued a hundred or so yards back by a second line of cars, all plus hundred or so yards transcending of a large pack of cars that may still be running in parallel lines but are doing more dicing than drafting...Cars that run alone, often stuck dangerously mid two draft lines, will come in sight to drift irrevocably backward.

Freed of the handcuff of racing's formalism, the difference Traffic Animals are born, rooted in transient symbioses midst individual patches of drivers that will crystalise into the organs of the beast. But the run of things have to be just right for one to emerge. The unholy Hieronymus Bosch-style concert of homicidal applied-shadenfreude that may characterise your urban, intra-urban or sub-urban driving experience is not ripe ground for ATA growth: too frothy.

The sociological and scatological dances of the megalopolis rushhour, too, are behind the scope of this article, and are at any rate most likely best explored with deep computer simulations using high-tech automata tools with bourgeois driver profiles linked to real-world statistics of roadway usage coupled with an army of ten thousand cloudy ax-wielding orcs sanguinary an equal number of obedient clonetroopers.

Rather, this field is perfect fodder for the epicurean ethologist, observing phenomena with a keen eye, an open mind and a sharp pencil. And while much has been written apropos manipulating traffic waves, the dynamics of traffic jams and phase-transitions in traffic density, very little time has been devoted to the observation and portraiture of persistent multi-car zoomorphia.

Early Observations

The give origin to first became on the ball of the existence of ATAs while making his way through the hinterland of Canada on a long, mid-winter solo drive in a decrepit Dodge mare with no functioning radio. Due to his dangerous penchant for immersive daydreaming in the inadequacy of external stimuli, he began to parasite his driving decisions by locking in none too soon not that sort car with akin speed ambitions. By reserving a sliver of appreciativeness for tracking the red bit lights of the "lead" car for changes in speed or direction, the patriarch was able to peacefully enjoy his trance while a hefty tire of road was outsourced to the other driver, causing the front car to function as a sort of early warning mechanism for irregular conditions (including the Mounties' speed-traps).

The notion resurfaced while the literary man was wrestling a dented Volkswagen Rabbit rental down a twisting, pot-holed two-lane jungle highway through the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. As the journey began he found himself hedged inside a short parade of other tourists, all driving their rental cars out of the landing at circa the same time at a hesitant pace, frequently to process the unfamiliar leafy darkness ahead. Fearing injury, the realize laterally-leapfrogged the indecisive parade and drove on into the murk alone. Remembering his success in the far north, he latched onto the back of a local vehicle (a home-modded convertible overhang haulage ten people, standing room only), using its varying speed as an indicator of road conditions. Unexpectedly, this move was noticed by several of the other tourists, who began to fight to separate themselves from the melee and join the newer, more surefooted pack that was rapidly pulling ahead...

By the time the framer had reached his exit the impromptu fleet of vehicles had crop up a persistent, homeostatic phenomenon. The fleet had quickly learned to manipulate the spacing midst its components in order to remain permeable to faster moving local traffic while defending its integrity en route to more disruptive external vehicles. Pulses of facts signifying when the passing lane was through-and-through rippled down the wire through a conscientious leaning into the gravel shoulder, serviceable in the process of expectorating invaders. Several of the original tourist vehicles ended up that be swapped out for other vehicles without rocking the boat. Later on, even the leader was swapped out for otherwise experienced local car.

It was a fetching game, contributing to the welfare of all of its players in an interesting way, but it was not a true ATA. It was too conscious a contrivance to be aught more than a delightful spontaneous social event.

You see, a distributed non-spiritual with human components can be very sensitive to perturbations from within. It is only when the conflicting threads of goals, reasoning and competition among individual human minds are quietened into the purlieu noise that the soil can truly be ripe to raise a complex beast. When drivers can fall into a semi-hypnotic state and their herd instincts take over, the seeds are laid for something greater.

Habitat

While there are thousands of traffic fallow deer good manners grounds longitudinally the paved networks of the world, only one driving region has been extensively explored at this time, largely due to budgetary considerations.

The TransCanada Highway is a nearly ideal environment for the production of large-scale ATA phenomena, due in great part to the simplicity of its shape: all cars are moving either westbound or eastbound, streamlining the goals of the drivers in much the same way as the shape of the Daytona superspeedway encourages drafting partnerships (see above). Also, considering there are long stretches through lonely wilderness and semi-tundra, nascent traffic animals have a long period in which to mature in times past homeward versus obstacles like influxes of new cars or navigating heels over head towns; and for the highway wends its way directly through most of Canada's major cities, it provides a handy litmus test for the homeostatic integrity of a given specimen simply by observing whether or not it makes it through to the other side of the urban area intact.

While daytime ATA formation is not rare, it is under the cover of darkness that development can proceed in a at the outside unfettered fashion. This is due in large part to the more abstract, disconnected experience of interacting with other vehicles merely as points of bogus light. Familiar prejudices and stereotypes -- potential sources of destructive competition -- are smoothed out by the shadows. At least on the aspiration of visual impressions, a Volvo and a Camaro can enter a system as peers.

Diminished visibility resulting from mild to moderate weather conditions can have a similar equalising effect, but when conditions get too severe drivers tend to body into packs for safety, leading to pseudo-ATA fleets that are all too conscious social events (as in the Quintana Roo experience).

Show me an wintry stretch of prairie transcontinental highway at twilight, and I will show you the secret zoo of the road.

Typical Morphologies

The most acid form of multi-car life is the Asipetal Caterpillar, also known as a worm. Worms initiate when a stable solo vehicle spawns a linear, single-lane cycle of vehicles composed of loose monomers joining at the rear (a heedfully related, but dysfunctional, construct known as an Acropetal arthropod grows by estimation vehicles to the front of the chain, generally leading to destructive diffusion or autolysis). Short, lithe worms are the fundamental production top of healthy ATA tissue. Perverse, long-form worms are the seeds of congestion and death.

The second lone element of ATA tissue stands in stark contrast to the worm, for it is a fleeting thing, and when it takes concrete form at all it is often manifested as a single car. The ostensible Coxswain is a vehicle that appears, to the conscious or semi-conscious mind of one or more drivers, to be a leader of the worm. When the self-evident Coxswain changes lanes, there is a higher probability that a majority of the worm will follow suit than if the commute were initiated by a less trusted vehicle. In many cases each car in a worm perceives the car immediately precociously of it to be the imaginary Coxswain, leading to domino-effect lane-transitions; such formations have high homeostatic integrity cause of the worm's handiness to "find a new head" should one peripheral Coxswain be lost to the currents. (Please note: the self-explaining Coxswain should not be confused with the Virtual Coxswain or the Napoleonic Coxswain, discussed below.)

Formations that attain to such integration turn into Cholingers: Asipetal Caterpillars with tightly-integrated internal feedback systems of illusory Coxswains, good of transmitting information from tip to tail with high fidelity. Cholingers can slither to steer clear of torn tyres on the road, twitch roughly slow-moving vehicles, and even slip through packs of unfavourable worms, wild axenes and other traffic froth to arrive at on the other side intact.

Of course, not all Cholingers slip through the strangers: sometimes they interact.

Every Cholinger is either benthic or pelagic. Benthic Cholingers travel at a similar rate to the currents of the road, while Pelagic Cholingers travel at a dissimilar rate when compared to other traffic (typically a faster rate). It is possible, however, for a benthic line to be picked up and select by a pelagic cousin, leading to a coupled form. This is the first real holistic Traffic woodchuck we will meet tonight: a bilaterally unequal diageotrope known as the Epiphysian Cyclosalp.

Within the body of the Cyclosalp the individual Cholingers are transmuted into a pair of Librigenates -- stretchy, free-flowing tissue that is patented in space by the relationship with its partner, the accelerating pelagic lobe sliding forward and the steady benthic lobe glamorous up in a slow-motion slingshot, compressing and expanding betwixt and between the loose, senseless clumps of other cars. This accordion-like effect might initially seem to be a force tearing the unrefined apart, rending pelagic from benthic -- and this is indeed what might happen in too rarified an incident -- but when presented with obstacles of any kind, the Librigenates that comprise the Cyclosalp fall back on their Cholinger heritage of local integrity, crystallising en masse to navigate the hazard.

Unfettered, the Epiphysian Cyclosalp is like half a butterfly, its riparian body gilded by a slowly flapping wing of accelerating, gliding Librigenates ebbing and flowing in a stately round. Its insides whorl as partners switch places, benthic turning succinctly pelagic, pacer cars joining a rippling pulse of local inertia forward, headlights cross-sweeping.

It is outside the scope of this first draft to detail the myriad habitat that provide seed for the profitable entanglement of multiple Cyclosalpic streams. So diverse are the possibilities that we could fill a apostolic tome without scratching the surface, without revealing the colloquial thread of simplicity upon which the complexity hinges. Suffice to say the larger clade includes such varied forms as the whiplashing Epinastic Tricyclosalp, the many-fingered Dicyclosalp Fimbriatum, and the diaphanous, fleeting wonder of the mile-long Merosporangic Super-Cyclosalp...

Of course, not all Asipetal Caterpillars grow up to make over stately Cholingers; instead, they lock into Lego-like of uniform properties styled Pycnoblastoids. While short-lived Apiculate Pycnoblastoids (in which the tangible Coxswain is everywhere the most forward car) are more common, it is the more flexible Laxiflorous Pycnoblastoid (in which the deceptive Coxswain is any car except that most forward) that lives a more fruitful life.

For instance, consider the case of a typical composite entity like a Tripycnoblastic Oomycotum, in which independent pycnoblasts jockey for position internally directly or by proxy through one or more Napoleonic Coxswains (that is, drivers who suffer from the delusion that they are single-handedly responsible for steering/leading their local sub-structure). The domino-line operation of an Apiculate Pycnoblastoid makes it too fugitive to survive the stresses of as long as permeated by a competing pycnoblast, whereas the visibly elastic structure of the Laxifloroid -- imparted due to the inherent time delay involved in co-ordinating with a mid-fleet visible Coxswain -- retains a perfect tone of rigidity and looseness, riding a line needle orchestration and dissolution that makes composite forms like Oomycota possible.

Pycnoblastic tissue is unusual in that it makes use of some level of sense perception on the part of the driver that they are participating in a formation (though drivers are only likely to be alive of the local level of structure). When this recognition reaches a unitary level the composite entity is usually destroyed by internal stresses, but occasionally a dissolving multi-pycnoblast will emit a stream of highly energised vehicles -- the Apheresoid Lirellate, a concentrated apiculatoid pycnoblast flung free from the miasma of death to rocket away, using for a coxswain the out of sight petard itself.

...These are but the fringes of the zoo, the tip of the iceberg.

We have not even touched on the sensitive antennae of the Stipitate Phototaxites fringed with Virtual Coxswains, pseudo-lead cars ready to be sacrificed to trip any trap, the shapeless wrath of the Biflagellate Ableptic Figmo and the fate of the cystidial flotsam locked within them; the weird rhythms of the Cacospysic Super-Barbicanoids and their elaborate dance of shifting coxswains, the Highness of the motorcycle-based Raging Fallaxoid; the menagerie of endless cancers that can grow from unexpectorated papillic granulomae, from cataracts of geriatric nektons, or from service-stations with awfully planned driveways.

Further Study

The study of a new order of life is not without its risks, both professional (in terms of reputation) and practical (in terms of maimed by mis-navigated vehicles). The zealot automotive ethologist must not only have keen skills of observation, but also the fortitude to persevere despite the slings and arrows of dubious dissenters. Like Leeuwenhoek's controversial animalcules and Pasteur's superstition-defying microbes, there will month after month exist a telling testudinal resistance to new ideas near older quarters. There will be those who doubt the very existence of the entirety vehicular life, or who insist that the zoo of the road dwells in metaphor alone.

The opinions of such sceptics could be deviant by a single night spent on a grassy hill overlooking a well-travelled country highway, watching the streams of red and silver lights merge and split, compress and attenuate, roil and interact, fatten and reproduce...

Watch the roads, and see the zoo for yourself. There is no denying its patterns of insectile purpose, its myriad variations in separation and configuration, or the orchestrated madness of the low-cost petroleum feeding frenzy. Your own mind, honed by thousands of generations of natural selection to recognise life from non-life, will tell you it is true; the disciplines of Scotch observation and meticulous systematics will tell you how, and why.

Open your eyes, and witness an untapped world.

More Articles: