I was really enjoying reading "Wisdom of Crowds". One of the things that really has my imagination is the discussion of traffic jams. I never considered the evolution of the traffic jam but it is really interesting that a traffic jam can stay in place and move very little even though there is nothing "holding" traffic. The traffic jam can sit in place for hours with tens of thousands of cars moving thru it slowly only to find open road at the end.
The traffic jam can be caused by something as little as one or two cars hitting the breaks and starting a chain reaction of lane changes, new breaks, lane changes, more breaks and then the only lanes moving bottleneck to a single lane. All the traffic moves slowly back and forth with changing cars, aggressive drivers and everyone moving at different speeds. Eventually, the jam starts to stick and hold based on the larger reality that traffic coming into a jam (moving > 65) is always going faster then the traffic leaving a jam (more likely to be slowly speeding up or leaving at speed limit).
Do we have a progressive traffic jam? We have lots of idealistic and wonderful ideas speeding into a pipeline where the process for pushing along all the good ideas is a mess. Is there anything we can learn about moving an agenda from clearing up traffic jams?
Honk. Honk.
