As a thought experiment let’s take a technocratic moonshot: air traffic control but for 500k surface vehicles on 100k blocks.
Pricing reduces congestion, but only indirectly, and only in aggregate over the area to which it applies. Where is your ambition, hackers?! NYC could take this whole idea to the next level — level of hell, I’m sure some would think — and require that every vehicle needs a real time permit to be in motion on a block-by-block basis.
Permits are available only when the streets have capacity for another vehicle. When you park up, your permit gets released. When you want to get back on the road you join the back of the line for a new real-time permit to drive.
Stop lights could hold back traffic from entering congested areas. If you want to enter an area and it is full up, you have to sit and wait for another car to leave that cell. The central system manages the queues fairly: if a car exits the West boundary then you can enter on the East boundary if you were next in line.
It sounds like misery but honestly if the goal of any congestion policy is to ensure that traffic density never exceeds a given threshold, isn’t using globally coordinated block-level traffic control the ultimate way to achieve that goal?
The whole thing also sounds like a dream — again, possibly a fever dream — to implement and fine tune. NetEng has some transferable skills in this domain which could come in handy.
Slightly tongue-in-cheek, but also slightly hang on this is a great idea.