The traffic phenomena is also known as the Braess Paradox (and the Jevons Paradox, and the Lewis-Mogridge Position, and the Downs-Thomson Paradox - if traffic researchers could pick a lane, that might help with the public messaging).
The Braess Paradox is interesting because it's a network phenomena that applies to many fields; if you remove a wire from a conducting circuit, the current can sometimes flow faster, it can be more efficient to remove star players from sports teams to increase team performance (I think of this rule every time England bring Grealish on), and most disturbingly, allowing a species doomed to extinction to go extinct can reduce the number of cascading extinctions (https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms1163). It shows that networks will often not work in intuitive ways, and trying to run systems off intuition, which seems to be the plan behind most articles in the Telegraph, will not work.
The traffic phenomena is also known as the Braess Paradox (and the Jevons Paradox, and the Lewis-Mogridge Position, and the Downs-Thomson Paradox - if traffic researchers could pick a lane, that might help with the public messaging).
The Braess Paradox is interesting because it's a network phenomena that applies to many fields; if you remove a wire from a conducting circuit, the current can sometimes flow faster, it can be more efficient to remove star players from sports teams to increase team performance (I think of this rule every time England bring Grealish on), and most disturbingly, allowing a species doomed to extinction to go extinct can reduce the number of cascading extinctions (https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms1163). It shows that networks will often not work in intuitive ways, and trying to run systems off intuition, which seems to be the plan behind most articles in the Telegraph, will not work.