What problem does it solve? Heavy traffic erodes not only nerves, but the physical transportation network. In some areas which are a funnel to major cities, or major employers, just maintaining infrastructure does not change the level of traffic. While current planning focuses on how and where to spend transportation dollars, and engineering focuses on individual problem statements to suggest projects to planning, there is no current way to reduce volume in such extremely high volume areas. What is your solution and who does it apply to? The entire transportation system needs to be modeled in terms of entropy as defined by thermodynamics. By utilizing all methods of transportation available (including NJ Transit and private companies such as Uber and Taxis) a complete model of New Jersey's entire transportation system from border to border can be completed. Since the second law states that entropy always increases, modeling the system in terms of its entropy will isolate the areas of high and low entropy. Any work done in areas of high entropy will only cause them to get worse. This will tell us where there is room for growth and allow for a plan to divert some of the entropy away from the worst areas and maximize the tax dollars spent on system expansion. By utilizing this method to lower the volume of traffic in the worst areas, projects that repair the infrastructure in those areas will last longer. Over all, this will allow for the best possible use of each tax dollar spent on our transportation system. What is the anticipated impact? The infrastructure will become less over crowded. The time spent sitting in traffic jams will decrease. Infrastructure repair projects will last longer. All these things will allow for less money to be spent on repairing infrastructure prior to its natural life expectancy. This will allow for more money to be available for overlooked projects such as orphan bridge repair and system upgrades to improve efficiency. When the public begins to see improvements that last, they will feel that their quality of life has improved and the value of the tax dollars spent on such projects will be more apparent.
Interesting idea... Should be looked into further. A high entropy transportation system, I presume, is one with plenty of problems, particularly congestion and maintenance. What if those were united into an entropy index? Entropy is the inability of a system to work orderly, right?
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