The fight against traffic jams involves using a series of tools to ease traffic pressure. It particularly affects roadside assistance tow trucks when carrying out certain services.
Traffic jams are a problem in the 21st century. Despite new forms of mobility, travelling by private vehicle is still so common that it is quite normal to spend an average of between two and four days a year stuck in congestion if you live in a large city. In this article we will look at how the use of special lanes, the use of the central reservation as a crossing between carriageways, or real-time information through the Traffic Management Centres can help to ease the traditional tailbacks.
Let us first recall what Antonio Ruiz de Elvira, Professor of Applied Physics at the University of Alcalá de Henares, wrote in 2016 about why traffic jams occur. “The solution is education (position and speed), good design of city entrances and exits (strainers), alternative routes (a great many) such as communication networks, and wide hard shoulders on roads. This costs money, but what really takes effort is putting reason and human intelligence to work.”
Among other things, the professor proposed more hard shoulders, on both sides of each carriageway (four hard shoulders per dual carriageway), so that broken-down or crashed vehicles could be moved out of the way and roadside assistance tow trucks could gain quick access. And he lamented that “police, ambulances and tow trucks” have to make their way “through the soup of compressed vehicles (because they have not kept a distance of 100 metres between them) stopped behind the problem”.
Lanes and anti-congestion gates to tackle traffic jams
Bear in mind that the cause of a traffic jam can vary: bad weather, an accident, a breakdown, or an increase in traffic due to the date in the calendar (the eve of public holidays and holiday periods, the usual). Contraflow lanes, temporary lanes, reversible lanes… are some of the tools used to reduce traffic pressure. The Asociación Española de la Carretera (AEC) indicated almost a decade ago that information was going to be key. Transmitting information in real time, through panels and apps, is very important today, to report on critical stretches, adverse weather, rush hours and so on.
In the case of temporary lanes, the speed is reduced (between 60 and 80 km/h), and vehicles using them are required to use dipped headlights. Some run in the opposite direction to normal and are set up on dual carriageways and motorways, while others, the additional lanes, use the hard shoulders (so necessary, as indicated above) as an extra lane. Another type of lane that helps traffic flow more smoothly is the BUS-HOV lane, for buses.
We add one of the solutions used in unforeseen situations. These are the so-called anti-congestion gates or “transfers” which, through the central reservations, connect carriageways and allow emergency vehicles to change direction, helping, according to the Dirección General de Tráfico (DGT), to restore traffic flow in less time.