Reserving Your Commute

Transportation researchers are exploring models that would compel drivers to reserve slots at coveted intersections:

So let’s say you want to drive through one of these points. As you approach, your car contacts the “intersection manager” and tries to make a reservation. The intersection manager crunches the data on all other cars on the road, decides whether it can fit you in, and tells you how much a place will cost. At this point, to reserve a space, you pay a small reservation fee. That’s to keep people from reserving spaces on roads all over town.

Once your road reservation is made, then you continue on course to arrive at the intersection within a certain time window — as with restaurants, there can be a bit of flexibility here, though not too much. As you cross into the intersection on the desired course, you pay the remainder of the reservation cost. Naturally, fees will be highest along the most desirable corridors, for the same reason it’s hard to get a table at Komi.

Now let’s say you can’t get your first-choice reservation.

You still have options to get into town. For starters, you can choose another route and make a reservation with that intersection manager. You can also simply show up at the intersection and hope the manager finds you a place; again, as at a restaurant, something might open up, but you could be waiting a while. You can also brush past the manager and continue on the road anyway, but you’d risk causing an accident or getting a ticket.

When the system is operating at its theoretical peak, the prices at various intersections create incentives for people to find alternate commute routes — or, of course, to take public transit. Those incentives, in turn, should decrease congestion. (On the flip side, if managers ask too much for space on the road, their route will go out of business.) Sure enough, when [researchers Matteo] Vasirani and [Sascha] Ossowski ran their idea through a model of Madrid traffic, they found that as intersections profits increased, general travel times across the city decreased.