[Matt Herring]

It's called The Truth About Traffic...the science behind traffic.

Topics are:

* studying driving behavior while on the cell phone, eating, distracted, etc in a driving simulator
* Emergency driving skills (i.e. hydroplaning)
* road rage
* traffic jam busting and traffic waves
* NAVTEC instant traffic information via cell phone information transmission
* Gridlock Sam - NYC traffic coordinator talking about city driving grids (this was a very cool part of the show where the NYC Dept. of Transportation Traffic Center monitors and controls every intersection of traffic in Manhattan monitoring over 18,000 traffic lights including tunnels and all roadways. They program and change traffic lights in real time to react to traffic conditions. Really cool!
* Studying animal traffic behavior, organization and communication (like ant colony movement, locust swarms and fish schools) to apply learned knowledge for human traffic organization
* Roundabouts (aka rotery intersections)
* Shared space cities in Holland where there are no traffic lights or signs and no structured traffic direction (and no sidewalks either). Cars, people and bikes coexist with no organization. The city was redesigned to force drivers to relax their driving style to communicate with each other within their cars to drive effectively and safely through the city. This was very interesting!

Show is pretty good...very brief time spent on each topic as the show is only an hour long...but worth a watch. I'll update this post with the topics in case anyone wants to look up the episode. If you want a more detailed description of any of the bullet points I'm sure MadisonMPG or myself can explain...nothing like a Friday night watching the tube!