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Engineers: Traffic Studies Use Simulation Software, Not Lane Closings
Lucas123 writes "The so-called 'traffic study' that closed New Jersey access lanes on the heavily traveled George Washington Bridge last September has left engineers scratching their heads, because in modern America, simulation software is used instead of closing down lanes. One of the best sources for simulation data are video camera systems that use software to count vehicles on roadways. Traffic studies use microscopic traffic simulations to create virtual environments that can model driver behavior to road changes with exacting detail. Instead, the Port Authority, under Gov. Chris Christie, shut down two of the three access lanes for four days last September from Fort Lee to the George Washington Bridge without warning the public, citing a 'traffic study.' 'I would be pretty confident that if we knew exactly which lanes are closed we could replicate that, and it would show exactly how bad the backups are going to be,' said Lorenzo Rotoli, an engineer and vice president at Fisher Associates, a civil engineering firm in New York that works on roads, bridges and signal systems."
This was a spiteful and petty act of retribution, pretty much much as reported already.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
He was studying how playing traffic god would impact his political career
The real question is whether it ordered by a rogue official(s), or the governor himself. If information comes out that the governor was involved then he just lost himself a chance at being president.
It's pretty well understood to anyone following this story that there was no "traffic study". That was just the excuse given by someone when he was initially questioned about it. There's very little need to refute that argument at this point.
When I was in college, my Analysis of Stochastic Systems class had a lot of assignments that required us to model traffic patterns in various ways. It was a great way to apply the math and theory we had learned. Fifteen years ago simulation software was pretty good, but with advances in computing power and the access to so much data, I imagine that modern simulations can be exceptionally accurate.
Unless, of course, the study was on road rage or something...
Christie is going to have to practice his lying skills if he wants to seriously be a contender for president. I mean, come on.. .Clinton.. the bushes.. Obama.. they gotta be looking at him as total j.v.
Or is this just because Christie is a republican. 2016 is starting early around here.
The democrat governor of MY state closed the DMVs in all the districts that voted in republican delegates. Didn't make the news at all. And now he's a U.S. Senator.
:wq
The dinosaurs conducted a real meteor study. Simulations are for those puny tree monkeys.
Table-ized A.I.
Those are called "Laps"
It was a "traffic study".
If you believed for one moment that it was an actual traffic study, I have a closed bridge to sell you.
A traffic road rage simulation? Hmmm, there are plenty of "angry rampage" games that could be adapted.
Table-ized A.I.
As reported by the NYTimes
All that for not endorsing him? What kind of goomba is this guy? So, he's have the State Police beat the shit out of you if you criticize him and call it a "Police training exercise"?
So much for the Great White Republican Hope for President in '16.
Maybe they'd get Christine Todd Whitman?
Nah! Too sane! The right wing social conservative Evangelical nut jobs would never go for her!
"lucas123" has an obvious "slant" in their writing...and Slashdot appears to encourage such "douchebags".
Was the closing wrong? Yes. No argument here.
Does the excuse used make any sense? No...and no argument here.
Did the closings endanger any lives? Possibly...but I don't live in NJ or NY so I can't say or argue with any certainty.
Did Gov. Christie "do the right thing" by firing the aide that sent the "time for traffic problems in Fort Lee" email? Yes.
Are there other people to blame? Probably yes. I read online (wish I had the link) that 1 or more Port Authority officials have stepped down due to this.
Is Gov. Christie at fault in any way in this matter? Hard to say from what I have seen and read so far.
I don't live in NJ so my views are those of "an outside looking in" through the eyes of various forms of news media (TV, Internet, etc.).
And for anyone that has ever managed any amount of staff, as a manager you know you can't control every action taken by every member of your staff. If they screw up in some way, you evaluate the resulting problem and the employee, then make a judgement call. If the screwup impacted a customer, you apologize to the customer, attempt to satisfy the customer's needs, then valuate the impact and make a judgement call regarding the employee. Folks, it's that simple. The rules regarding "people management" don't go into great detail at any company, but they probably list the "termination offenses" for which a manager can fire an employee and still have the company's support (legal and otherwise) in the matter; everything else is "a judgement call".
captcha: insights (how appropriate)
The lane closings were a naked abuse of political power.
Personally, I want the people who did it to lose their jobs and end up in court.
However, they will have to wait their turns, as the courts will be busy with all the IRS staff who nakedly abused their IRS powers to put a boot on the neck of anyone they didn't like.
I don't even live anywhere near New Jersey. NJ doesn't affect me. The IRS, that affects me. IRS power abuse that amounted to tampering with an election? Yeah that affects me.
Nail everybody, but start with the Feds and work your way down.
Oh, wait. You say that nobody at the IRS was fired? Nobody is going to end up in court?
Your high falutin' traffic engineers don't give the Sopranos the contract to do traffic studies.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
And judging from the comments, I'm soooo glad that there's an entire ocean between me and that place. Anyway, greetings from Europe.
Like we haven't heard enough about the politics. Here's $5.00 for someone willing to actually talk about the science and technology that TFA is presenting.
``Eventually these models will get sophisticated enough to be able simulate "really odd driver behaviors"``
Well that doesn't explain car pool lanes, where the lane next to the carpool lane is full of people who go slow on the theory you can illegally pass them on the left. If the model could account for that, there'd be a lot fewer of the things.
For the curious: here is a link to Sumo, which is a real, scientific traffic simulation software developed by the DLR in Germany.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
To validate their simulations with some real world data.
Another reason to talk about the "Bridgegate" scandal instead of, I dunno, real news like Obamacare, unemployment, our moribund economy, the ongoing blunders in foreign policy, NSA surveillance, etc.
Please, let's talk about Chris Christie some more.
-Styopa
what about some high speed EZ-pass lanes there that may help a lot.
So they are modeling traffic after bacteria? No wonder it's a mess.
Here you have somebody indicating that they use simulations to determine if lanes should be closed. The root cause is that there doesn't have to be a reason for the various transportation departments to close roads or lanes. In this case we all know this was political retribution but how many of the incessant lane closures on bridges and highways are just because of incompetence? We've been dealing with an ARRA funded road project for the past 5 years and they close lanes, redirect traffic, block access without any rhyme or reason. Fortunately it's close to being finished now but for the past 5 years it's been hell for people who have to travel in that area (airport). All this happening while on the other side of town they decide to blow up another interstate corridor not more than 5 years after disrupting the same corridor. These aren't about political retribution, these are about overly ambitious projects run by idiots who think that their simulation software takes into account a car with a flat tire blocking a lane because there's on emergency area, causing a backup for miles and putting people's lives at risk.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Good luck getting elected now ya meathead.
Look it, Christie is the closest thing the Reps have these days to someone who could get elected in the general election. And if the powers that be in the Rep party want him, they'll sell him to the Teabaggers and Evangelical crazies - all he has to be is not a Democrat. Trust me, no matter how disgusting the republican "base" may find him, they will vote for him over a Democrat ANY day! I have seen it.
I live in a Republican stronghold. I watched the Evangelicals vote for Romney - a MORMON - and a Massachusetts LIBERAL - just to vote Republican.
The poor Libertarians still had like 3% of the vote.
People are sheep and they'll vote for who we want them to vote for: Dem or Rep, they are our bitches.
-Bankers
There was another "study" to track guns by giving them to the Mexican gans and other criminal elements. All done for studies, here is the wiki link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal I would also think that even simulation softare is not necessary to predict that there will be casualties. US Citizen, officer Brian Terry has died from this. Countless Mexicans have died and will die from this "study". U.S. government still had not briefed them on what went wrong nor had they apologized. At least Christie appologized, give him a credit for that.
Cristie would be even more toast than he is anyhow.
Seems goons like that are attracted to offices he got in which brings to mind why perhaps the NSA gets it's way because they have so much stuff to smear anyone and use that as leverage to get to play their little boys power games.
The only soft wear they got in New Jersey are them velour track suits.
And this is a perfect example of how, if you repeat your false story enough times, people will believe it. The IRS office in question flagged groups from all over the political spectrum to determine if they were engaging in political activities that would prevent them from being tax exempt charities. Yes, they used "Tea Party" as a flag for further investigation, but they also used "Occupy". They were attempting to enforce the law passed by Congress, albeit in a very bad, possibly illegal way. For the record, they started these investigations after specific requests from Congress to make sure these nonprofits weren't breaking the law. But the House very carefully tailored their requests to make it appear that only conservative groups were targeted, and attempted to suppress testimony that demonstrated groups from all over the spectrum were affected. Once the full testimony transcripts were released, the press realized there wasn't really much of a story and mostly dropped it. But low-information voters like you never bothered to follow the story to its end.
what can easily be explained by laziness.
To quote another poster:
And this is a perfect example of how, if you repeat your false story enough times, people will believe it. The IRS office in question flagged groups from all over the political spectrum to determine if they were engaging in political activities that would prevent them from being tax exempt charities. Yes, they used "Tea Party" as a flag for further investigation, but they also used "Occupy". They were attempting to enforce the law passed by Congress, albeit in a very bad, possibly illegal way. For the record, they started these investigations after specific requests from Congress to make sure these nonprofits weren't breaking the law. But the House very carefully tailored their requests to make it appear that only conservative groups were targeted, and attempted to supress testimony that demonstrated groups from all over the spectrum were affected. Once the full testimony transcripts were released, the press realized there wasn't really much of a story and mostly dropped it. But low-information voters like you never bothered to follow the story to its end.
It's possible they just wanted to test this aspect of the simulation model. Human behaviour is unpredictable.
people will point out all the evil shit you do. how rude!
As user braeldiil said above:
And this is a perfect example of how, if you repeat your false story enough times, people will believe it. The IRS office in question flagged groups from all over the political spectrum to determine if they were engaging in political activities that would prevent them from being tax exempt charities. Yes, they used "Tea Party" as a flag for further investigation, but they also used "Occupy". They were attempting to enforce the law passed by Congress, albeit in a very bad, possibly illegal way. For the record, they started these investigations after specific requests from Congress to make sure these nonprofits weren't breaking the law. But the House very carefully tailored their requests to make it appear that only conservative groups were targeted, and attempted to suppress testimony that demonstrated groups from all over the spectrum were affected. Once the full testimony transcripts were released, the press realized there wasn't really much of a story and mostly dropped it. But low-information voters like you never bothered to follow the story to its end.
See how well you model matches up to the reality that was.
Until then, shut your piehole.
you are correct. just because we accept it from the current President and his minions does not mean we should accept it from any potential replacements.
FYI that's false. The Obama administration said that for about 26 hours before they started walking back that claim.
Within hours after they said it, someone did the math and it showed that conservative groups were referred about 80 times as often as liberal groups.
That's kind of like claiming there was no racial bias in 1940s West Virginia because while there were thousands of black people in prison, there were also three white guys.
LBJ (Progressve Democrat) built his "great society" .... and also used the IRS to go after his political opponents
Nixon (Progressive Republican) created the EPA, did wage&price controls .... and used the government to go after his political opponents
Clinton (Progressive Democrat) grew the government and tried HillaryCare .... and used the FBI to get all the background files on all the top Republicans
Obama (Progressive Democrat) gave us Obamacare .... and used the IRS to go after the TEA Party, the ACA to go after conservative Catholics, and jailed a "filmaker" for Benghazi
Christie (Progressive Republican) used control of a bridge to abuse an opponent (smaller-scale -> smaller opponent -> smaller abuse)
Sure, the above are VERY different levels of "progressive" from "slightly" to "all-in" ... Christie, for example, supports big govt and gun control and tolerates gay marriage (the left-edge of Repub party) and while Nixon, LBJ, and Clinton never supported gay marriage etc (current progressive tent poles) they were ALL big-government-is-your-friend types in ACTION (though Nixon pretended otherwise during campaign primaries). People who like big government and believe in big government intervention in peoples' lives ALSO like to USE big government for other things; they are easily tempted by it because, at a base-level, they lack a healthy fear of big government that other people have; they assume government is a valid tool and they believe their goals are good and valid (if they thought otherwise, they'd select other goals).
"I would be pretty confident that if we knew exactly which lanes are closed we could replicate that, and it would show exactly how bad the backups are going to be,' said Lorenzo Rotoli, an engineer and vice president at Fisher Associates, a civil engineering firm in New York that works on roads, bridges and signal systems."
But can your model replicate the political payback present during this road closure? You may want to consider upgrading your software model then.
Have gnu, will travel.
Aside from being a great excuse for anything secretive, not all "traffic studies" can be simulated. For example, if you were testing new traffic simulation software, you can't simulate your own authentication. Trust but verify.
Well, start with whether the results agree with common sense. If you close 2/3 of the lanes serving Fort Lee, then traffic coming up Routes 1 and 9 backs up onto the streets of Fort Lee and you get a slight improvement for through traffic coming up I-95. The actions taken were so drastic it doesn't take an expert to predict the consequences -- which is why the "study" was so fishy.
But suppose you have a legitimate need to be absolutely sure what would happen if you did something so boneheaded as close 2/3 of the traffic in a major artery that flows through the streets of a 3 square mile town. Then run your model, and shut down *one* lane for *one* hour to see if your model predicts correctly. Or shut down both lanes for a full day, if the information is absolutely critical to operations (which nobody argues it was). But don't run the experiment for *five* days, when all it is telling you is what common sense and a gas station map could tell you.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The Democrats and media wouldn't be going on all-out attack mode for no reason. The reason is obviously that they need to create enough of a scandal to torpedo his 2016 presidential chances to let Hillary ride to the win. From now until then they'll be attacking him mercilessly as long as they think he may run, or they've destroyed him. A centrist Republican who can appeal to the average Democrat is too dangerous.
Not that I would ever vote for Christie myself were he to run, but it is an interesting dynamic to watch in our politics and media.
I worked with traffic engineers on traffic studies in the 1990s. The objective was to measure traffic behaviour and feed the resulting data into models. You don't change traffic flow for a study because that would invalidate the model.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
...by everyone but the six-pack of clowns who hatched this plan.