Q) Time to drive through every intersection in London

Caporegime
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
32,650
Thought I would ask in here rather than GD to get sensible answers, plus the problem may appeal to programmers and CS majors.

This is not homework and I am more than capable of working out theoretical limits and algorithms etc., What I struggle to know is taking into account realistic traffic conditions and how that might affect the time costs. I have never lived in a big city and my idea of traffic congestion is if there is 1 car in front of you at a red light. Actually, the mere existence of a traffic light in my life is rare :D


I am more interested in people methods and assumptions than someone some how giving a correct answer- i don't know the correct answer to verify.


How long you you reckon it would take to drive most of of the streets in London. Specifically, I am really only interested in the time taken to drive through each intersection, not necessarily along each road segment.
So it is a bit like how Google collected their data for street view but we are only interested in the intersections of roads, not the segments.
Lodnon is just a suggestion, you could use any similar large city in Europe or the US


There are some constraints and assumptions:
  • The Driver can only drive 8 hours per day
  • You have to take into account realistic traffic conditions, traffic jams, congestion and strictly obey all speed limits
  • Ignore stops for breaks, these can be estimated once the total drive time is estimated.
  • Rather than 100% coverage of every possible intersection, we would be interested in merely covering a sufficient %, say 70-80%.
  • Bonus point, how much quicker would it be to cover ONLY central london vs greater london?
  • Bonus points, we only want to drive through an intersection with a traffic light and will have a map giving positions of all lights, how much quicker would this make the task in london.
  • Bonus points, how much longer will it take to drive every transition of every intersection? e.g. taking all straight-thru, left or right turns? My guess would be something horrific like 10 times longer




Useful data would be how long it takes you to drive a certain distance through central London during a weekday daytime?
 
Last edited:
The 8 hours is best during normal working hours, accepting that this is the worst time to travel through a city. But if you could give an estimate for 8 hours during working time and a different estimate for 8 hours over night and weekends that would be great.




I have been looking at Manhattan and found out there are about 1200 miles of roads, but to cover intersections with only traffic lights would reduce this distance a lot. The avcerage driving speed of Taxis is 10-11mph, the question is does this include stopping for red lights/traffic jams and is an average over all trips, or does it only include data for driving between stops/lights/jams etc.
 
Back
Top Bottom