Highway Traffic statistics
SWMBO wanted to go for a walk last Sunday. It’s early morning, little traffic so we went on my 5k route, it wanders into an industrial park and two streets that have little parking alongside them. Cause it’s been icy one street that doesn’t have a sidewalk is narrowed considerably compared to summertime conditions. So off we go and there isn’t a single car through most of the walk until we are heading home along the narrow street that is ice and snow packed just off the pavement.
We are over 2.5 miles into the walk and we approach a spot where there is a parked car on the north side of the street, we are walking along the south side, it is the only parked car along the entire walk. We are headed east and as we near the car a pickup shows up headed towards us from the west about 1/4 mile behind, then as it nears a car pulls into the street headed towards us from the east. We all meet at the same point, just as we cross the point were the parked car is, so it’s us, both cars going east and west and the lone parked car along the 3 mile route. We finished the walk without seeing any other traffic.
It got me thinking, do traffic engineers have a way to calculate the statics of random events like that; what would be the chances of the two moving cars meeting as they reach us walking since they were the only two cars we encountered in 5k, and then what would be the chance of meeting us at the lone parked car?
It seems to be impossible, no one would ever bet on it, but traffic does seem to move in improbable ways.
Like travelling down an almost empty interstate clustered with 5-10 other cars, no one behind or ahead for 1/2 a mile.
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