Can vibes plan a city?

How Well Do You Know Chicago Traffic? A Local Got 1 in 4 Right

First the city: a Chicago geography crash course, four congestion scorecards that disagree about this one city by 33 hours a year, and the 29.6-minute commute that sits inside a spread of 3.4 minutes across eight big metros.

Then the quiz. Four questions on his own home turf: the intersection the crash data ranks first, the Hillside Strangler, the $806M Jane Byrne rebuild, and a bracket for the most annoying intersection in the city.

"Two people, one car, feel the vibes, you got a plan."

He finished at 25%. His defense: 25% is better than 0%.

Can Vibes Fix Chicago Traffic? We Built a Simulation to Find Out

Thomas's upgrade list for Chicago goes up against the sim: the city imported from OpenStreetMap down to the turn restrictions, then run scenario by scenario, so two proposed fixes get ranked instead of argued about.

The loop zone alone: 23,833 lanes, 2,217 signal programs, 6,738 homes and 2,426 workplaces, all of it moving before anybody touches a thing.

The phantom jam gets measured on the way through. 17.04 seconds of aerial 4K drone footage, 426 frames, turned into 154 stop events by an open-source library that is now public.