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You should see these guys in traffic. (Photo: Arthur Chapman via Flickr)

Wow, we humans seem pretty darn advanced.

We kiss the sky with our skyscrapers and surf the Interwebs on our iPhones. In America, we built the interstate highway system (U.S.A.! U.S.A.!).

Heck, we can even get Randy Leonard to stop climbing around on fiery roofs long enough to flip on the “Made in Oregon” stag’s red nose. Ah, fire and the warm holiday glow of electricity.

Unfortunately, when it comes to getting around, we’re hardly the most advanced species.
Army ants — yes, bugs — have us beat.

Let’s throw this thing into reverse and travel back to eastbound U.S. 26 two Mondays ago.

Shortly
before 6:30 a.m, three cars got into a tangle on the rainy asphalt just east of the Vista Ridge Tunnel. No injuries. Just crumpled metal and two blocked lanes.

By 7 a.m., police and road crews had cleared the wreckage. The inbound commute was flowing again, right?

Actually, as anyone who was caught in the hamster-spinning-on-a-wheel gridlock will tell you, that didn’t happen. Traffic from the tunnel to 182nd Avenue in Washington County was stop and go until almost 10 a.m.

On
the radio, the traffic announcers had stopped talking about the crash when Courtney Nelson of Beaverton left home at 8 a.m. “I didn’t get to work until 9:30,” she said, “a half hour late.”

To hundreds of
motorists, it seemed like they were caught in a traffic jam for no visible reason. Some probably reacted to the phantom menace with thoughts of “build, baby, build!” — as in, more highway lanes.

But in reality, they ran into a defect in human evolution.

“This
is basically a queuing problem,” said Chris Monsere, a civil and
environmental engineering professor at Portland State University’s
Center for Transportation Studies.

To explain, Monsere gave me
an equation: Flow=(density)X(speed). He talked about “parabolic shapes”
and e-mailed me his recent paper on the “impact of traffic oscillations
on freeway crash occurrences.”

Basically, when faced with the
tiniest commuting disruption, we brake — a lot. Individual commuters
act like their time is more valuable than someone else’s. We get less
cooperative.
It’s hard for newcomers to merge into the gridlock,
causing adjoining highways and roads to clog up. Then there’s the
rubber-necking.

No wonder a pickup fire that blocked one lane
of the northbound Terwilliger Curves for 10 minutes on the morning of
Nov. 19 led to a two-hour Interstate 5 backup.  
Compare that to the ant colonies recently researched by a team of scientists in Germany, India, and Japan.  

Every morning, ants travel trails analogous to human highways to collect food and do work.

Unlike
human traffic, researchers found that the average velocity of ant
traffic remained the same despite increasing density.  The insects were
truly cooperative, achieving constant “free-flow.”

“For the ants,” one scientist concluded, “an efficient transport system is essential for the survival of a colony.”

Of course, I would argue the same applies to humans.

As the ants march on, at least state transportation officials have formulas to predict traffic delays.

At
low capacity, every minute of “an event” spawns four to five minutes of
delay. But during rush hour, every minute creates about 20 minutes of 
delay.  

Alas, there’s no equation to help decide when it’s
faster to exit and use side roads. “It’s a gut thing,” Monsere said.
“If you look at the average speed of arterials, it’s probably just as
fast to stay on the highway.”