[HN Gopher] A/B Street: A simulation game to fix Seattle's traffic
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A/B Street: A simulation game to fix Seattle's traffic
Author : zackham
Score : 152 points
Date : 2020-06-22 19:29 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (abstreet.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (abstreet.org)
| StillBored wrote:
| This is completely awesome. I've considered doing something
| similar (mostly while sitting around in Austin looking at traffic
| lights backing up 100+ cars to allow 2-3 to enter from a side
| street) or looking at a pair of lights (accidentally?) acting
| like a metering device. Particularly city wide as I'm 100%
| convinced that the actual traffic engineers here are doing
| something wrong. They reworked a bike lane a few years back on a
| street I was driving on daily and then I could see them out there
| for months trying to work around the fact that they backed up a
| couple major intersections a couple blocks away as a result.
|
| So the question is, given a bit of ML/etc driving it, and some
| actual commute time data, what are the changes something like
| this actually can be used to improve traffic?
| dabreegster wrote:
| There are lots of data quality and simulation assumption issues
| that prevent results from being meaningful. I'm mostly
| positioning this as a way to get people interested in coming up
| with specific ideas, but of course I'd love to reach
| trustworthiness parity with industry standard traffic sims.
|
| I actually got started in traffic sim while I was in Austin! If
| you know anybody there who'd be interested in putting in some
| work to get the area running smoothly, I'd love to include it
| as a second city in the game.
| evolve2k wrote:
| How much would be involved to adapt this to other cities?
| dabreegster wrote:
| https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/blob/master/docs/new...
|
| Biggest barrier is lack of trip demand data. If you come up
| with how many people leave from building1 to building2 at time
| T using some mode of transport, then this can work.
| kevmo314 wrote:
| I see you worked at Google at the same time I was there. I'm
| surprised we never got in touch, I helped work on a project
| that did traffic light optimization research, also
| investigating some of the approaches you mentioned, such as
| microbidding. We didn't build our own microsimulator but
| instead worked off of SUMO + OSM, which I'm sure you're
| familiar with. :)
|
| I no longer work there either, but feel free to reach out if
| you're interested in chatting.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| The trailer looks amazing. I was actually just imagining a video
| game like this a few days ago, so it is something of a wish
| fulfillment plus baader meinhoff syndrome to see this.
|
| I can't wait till tonight when I'll have enough time to get it
| installed and try it out!
| [deleted]
| qchris wrote:
| This project is wicked cool, and I almost missed that they built
| it using Rust. I like the language a lot, and I think something
| like this is a sign of it moving towards real maturity, where the
| utility of the programs starts outshining the method of its
| construction. I'll be really curious to see if any project
| proposals end up citing this over the next couple years as an
| impetus for starting to experiment with different approaches to
| their traffic infrastructure, or at least inspiring people to
| become more engaged with it.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Didn't notice either, I'm aware of rust but I've not seen
| bigger codebase in it, will have pull it and have a nosy.
|
| Thanks for pointing out that it's in rust.
| MasterScrat wrote:
| If you're interested in this kind of planning problems, check out
| the NeurIPS Flatland challenge, in which we try to optimize
| traffic on railway networks, in association with the Swiss and
| German railway companies!
|
| https://www.aicrowd.com/challenges/neurips-2020-flatland-cha...
|
| (disclaimer: I'm one of the organizers)
| schemescape wrote:
| This simulation confirms that the easiest fix is to not have the
| West Seattle bridge be broken :)
| tomlagier wrote:
| In the real world, how is traffic routed? I often wonder what
| controls obviously inefficient intersections and how easy or hard
| it is to fix that.
|
| I assume that there are software systems that take in schedules
| and various inputs (cameras, magnets, crosswalk buttons) but I'm
| curious if anyone works in the field and would talk about their
| experience.
| greeneggs wrote:
| Check out the Kimley-Horn Integrated Transportation System
| (KITS):
|
| https://www.kimley-horn.com/service/kits-advanced-traffic-ma...
|
| A user manual might give you some sense of the complications
| (bus priority, special events scheduling, etc.):
|
| https://dpw.lacounty.gov/TNL/ITS/KITS/site_files/LACO%20KITS...
| linuxftw wrote:
| The problem is there's only so much room for automobiles in a
| city. The more you decrease traffic, the more you'll induce
| demand to fill those improved traffic flow patterns.
|
| The more infrastructure that is built downtown, the more people
| want to be downtown.
| sytse wrote:
| If you like this game consider checking out Cities Skylines.
| Traffic is a major part of the game. With the vanilla edition you
| can already do a lot, but if you want to route lanes you need the
| traffic manager mod
| https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=16376...
| cyral wrote:
| Cities Skylines with the traffic manager mod is a great way to
| spend a whole lot of time if you are bored. It's surprisingly
| fun to try to optimize traffic.
| asdff wrote:
| And surprisingly frustrating. Why is my city gridlocked?
| Because only the left most lane of my 6 lane avenue is being
| used by these 1000 hot dog trucks leaving my port.
| com2kid wrote:
| Do any of the mods give the simulated people real commutes? I
| gave up after I made a city with a full subway system and zoned
| areas and watched as the simulated citizens left home, went to
| work, and then went to another random home at night.
|
| It completely ruined my fancy subway system's timetable. :(
| rzzzt wrote:
| A relevant movie from the USSR comes to mind (which was also
| discussed recently):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irony_of_Fate
| Faaak wrote:
| This idea was supposed to be my master's thesis project. However
| I found something different and never did the original idea but's
| it's always been in my mind.
|
| Big kudos to the author for this nice project ! I hope it gives
| further ideas to people playing it
| dabreegster wrote:
| Hi, author here. Previously posted to HN
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21763636). I just released
| alpha -- check out this cheesy trailer
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxPD4n_1-LU).
|
| Happy to answer questions! And if you're serious about running
| this in your city, the importing process has improved greatly
| since December, so get in touch.
| rkagerer wrote:
| It's like SimCity for a real city!
|
| I tried the Windows version and some of the UI controls don't
| respond to mouse clicks, e.g. home and gear button in bottom
| left, speed controls and dropdown. I noticed the target areas
| for them are about 90px below where the buttons are painted. So
| when I click the checkbox to show/hide Bus, it actually turns
| on and off the one for Car. I'm on v0.2.0b and the client area
| of my game window (excluding titlebar, edges) is about
| 2560x1520.
|
| Some elements, like the dropdowns at the top (Sandbox map and
| traffic setting) work ok.
|
| EDIT: Looks like schemescape beat me to reporting this. I'd
| love to know if this was just a dumb "programmer-oops" or if
| there's an opportunity for the language/libraries/framework to
| better funnel code toward correctness.
| fwip wrote:
| It would be awesome to see you model some real changes that the
| city has made over the last few years, and see how closely the
| "predictions" made by your model match up with the observed
| data! The big one is the viaduct closure, but even little
| changes that you saw in your own experience, like "Bus lane now
| extends for two more streets," could be really informative.
| schemescape wrote:
| Minor issue I noticed: whenever I launch the app on Windows,
| the mouse hit-targeting is off vertically by ~40 pixels.
| Resizing the window makes the problem go away for the rest of
| the session. I'm on Windows 10, 1920x1080, and I haven't
| modified scaling/DPI settings.
| dabreegster wrote:
| https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/issues/65
|
| Thanks for reporting! I'll try fixing this blind (no Windows
| machine handy) and send a new build; it'd be great if someone
| could confirm it.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| I wonder what the how far the optimal is from existing for
| variations of global vs greedy (local) optimization.
| flr03 wrote:
| Awesome job congratulations this looks it detailled, I can see
| there is a lot of work behind.
| korethr wrote:
| Kudos for this.
|
| Does this only simulate what would be considered a typical
| traffic load, or can it simulate outlier events (sport games,
| concerts, COVID quarantine, etc)?
| dabreegster wrote:
| Only fixed trips coming from https://www.psrc.org/activity-
| based-travel-model-soundcast. Demand modelling is next --
| changes you make to the map will influence existing trips to
| change mode. The biggest difficulty in simulating outlier
| events is making a clear UI for specifying that new load.
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| I've been really hoping for the Maps team at Google/Waze to
| release a similar "traffic congestion" view to highlight
| consistent hot spots. A simulation is also pretty good, but the
| real data from Maps/Waze users will be even better!
|
| Ideally, a government dashboard to see traffic congestion changes
| per year, month, day of week, but also hour. If we can create
| metrics for cities like p99 door-door trip time (i.e. latency)
| policy makers can better measure changes, bottlenecks, etc and
| plan better.
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| Your hope has come true! Kindof. I don't think this comes with
| a dashboard, but the data is there
|
| https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/waze-for-cities-data-puts...
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(page generated 2020-06-22 23:00 UTC)