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Abstreet: Traffic simulation game written in Rust

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Re: Abstreet: Traffic simulation game written in Rust

#21

Post by ken »

BelleOfTheBall wrote: post #15

While I'm not overly optimistic about his goal of getting solutions from the game to be enacted in real life Seattle, it's a really admirable idea and an impressive execution to boot. I'm wondering if, with a big enough budget and a team of skilled devs like Dustin here, the local government could create more refined simulations to tackle these planning issues. Or would that inevitably run into the problem mentioned…

> Project Mission: 'People are local experts on the small slice of the city they interact with daily -- the one left turn lane that always backs up or a certain set of poorly timed walk signals'

100% of the intersections I see that get backed up are backed up because someone blocks the box. Can we get more enforcement for that? They don't even need a patrol car. Just have an officer stand at the corner of Mercer and Westlake from 4pm to 7pm, and each time the light changes, walk out into the intersection and ticket the guy who's blocking it. You could write $1000 in tickets an hour, every night of the week.

Many intersections have threatening signs to this effect, but they don't do any good. I've never seen or heard of anyone getting ticketed for that.

Re: Abstreet: Traffic simulation game written in Rust

#22

Post by brylie »

A/B Street would fit really well into the Citybound project, as they are both striving to produce realistic simulations.

https://github.com/citybound/citybound

I really hope A/B Street and Citybound developers will work together.

https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/issues/20

https://github.com/citybound/citybound/issues/361

Re: Abstreet: Traffic simulation game written in Rust

#24

Post by dbetteridge »

farhanhubble wrote: post #8

I swear I was discussing exactly this sort of simulation with my brother as both of us wondered how many city planners model the changes they are making to the road networks before pumping millions into projects that dump traffic from one point to another. Additionally, it'd be interesting to simulate the cascading effect of traffic violations like bad parkings, straddling lanes. Kudos to Dustin for working on this.

See

AIMSUN

Linsig

Paramics

VISSIM

For examples of commonly used traffic modelling packages

More high level strategic modelling is often done in Cube

Re: Abstreet: Traffic simulation game written in Rust

#25

Post by throwawaysea »

ken wrote: post #21
BelleOfTheBall wrote: post #15

While I'm not overly optimistic about his goal of getting solutions from the game to be enacted in real life Seattle, it's a really admirable idea and an impressive execution to boot. I'm wondering if, with a big enough budget and a team of skilled devs like Dustin here, the local government could create more refined simulations to tackle these planning issues. Or would that inevitably run into the problem mentioned…

> Project Mission: 'People are local experts on the small slice of the city they interact with daily -- the one left turn lane that always backs up or a certain set of poorly timed walk signals' 100% of the intersections I see that get backed up are backed up because someone blocks the box. Can we get more enforcement for that? They don't even need a patrol car. Just have an officer stand at the corner of Mercer and…

I would be supportive of this as long as it is done with some degree of discretion. On every traffic light cycle each side must release at least one car for the system to work out (traffic light timing must accommodate this). Sometimes that first car has to get into the intersection. I don’t really fault that driver for doing so.

Re: Abstreet: Traffic simulation game written in Rust

#26

Post by jmpman »

I have a theory that restricting an on-ramp/off-ramp for one street during peak rush hour will significantly improve traffic flow on my freeway commute. I’ve taken the time to propose the change to my department of transportation, suggesting they simulate the change. Expect that suggestion went straight into the trash can.

Realistically, modeling this section of the freeway would be difficult, and proving there would be a net benefit - even harder, because there are accidents due to this on-ramp merge which cause the delays. The simulation has to model accidents to be valid.

If anyone knows of a way to simulate traffic, including changing accident probability based upon traffic flow (quick stops caused by merging traffic likely increase the accident probability), I’d like to model my commute and provide that to the department of transportation.

Re: Abstreet: Traffic simulation game written in Rust

#27

Post by blincoln »

ken wrote: post #20

This is pretty cool! One thing that bothers me about every traffic simulation I've ever seen, though: all of the vehicles and pedestrians here seem to be obeying the law. That's just not realistic -- especially on Mercer, which is blocked (both directions) every few minutes in rush hour by some jerk trying to make an illegal turn onto a packed street. I'd say the main causes of traffic blockages that I encounter duri…

I agree with you. However, this may be obvious, but some of that could be due to people trying to follow Google Maps, Waze, or other similar navigation system directions where the routes are generated based on what other users have done.

I drove in downtown Seattle rush "hour" traffic for the first time in almost a year earlier this week, and Maps was giving me all kinds of dangerous, traffic-jam-causing directions. Things like "make a left turn at an uncontrolled intersection, from a side street onto an arterial that's gridlocked for about a kilometer in either direction". Apparently it had been happening for awhile, because the city had installed a barrier across the median, and I couldn't have followed the directions even if I'd wanted to.

IOW, it's not just drivers ignoring the law, it's tech companies explicitly instructing drivers to break the law and cause traffic problems that the simulations need to account for now.

Re: Abstreet: Traffic simulation game written in Rust

#28

Post by Waterluvian »

setr wrote: post #19
Waterluvian wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks promising. But I don't see any sort of XML-like component layout/config so I assume it's all done by calling methods? That sounds kind of kludgy. Or am I missing an example?

What makes you think xml isn't kludgy

Oh it is. And I don't want the XML-style solution.

But I don't see any configuration option in the examples other than chaining method calls to set each config option. Is there something else?

Re: Abstreet: Traffic simulation game written in Rust

#30

Post by dabreegster »

noobermin wrote: post #5

Is this is a one person show? If so bravo! It looks like there's a mirror at google though, is this like a mini-google project?

I started the project while I was working at Google, went through the open source process, and then left a short while after to work on it full-time. There's no affiliation with Google.
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