Physics of Traffic Jams, October 22, 2007.
by Reinis Taukulis.

It is self-evident that traffic jams are causing serious problems to people all over the world. Starting at 1980's physicists were trying to understand how these traffic congestions arise and how to avoid them.

There are mainly two ways to tackle this problem - one can consider traffic flow to be similar to some thermodynamic process or one can simply simulate traffic on a computer. Advances in computer technologies allowed to develop simulations that can be used to improve traffic in real life.

One particularly interesting simulation can be found at http://www.traffic-simulation.de/