A LITTLE PLAYGROUND FOR BIG RIPPLE EFFECTS
One small brake.
A whole loop feels it.
Tap a car. Follow the ripple. Find the quiet rhythm that gets everyone moving again.
Cars move forward.
The jam travels backward.
0km/h
0km/h σ
0cars
Small field notes
It’s a following problem.
Each car responds to its speed, the gap ahead and the speed of the car in front. There is no red light, merge or lane change here. A tiny disturbance can become a traveling stop-and-go wave.
Play with the whole loop.
Sliders affect every driver immediately. Try Rush hour and brake a car, then compare Silky flow. Lowering desired pace can sometimes calm a wave. The live ripple is the standard deviation of all car speeds.
A little keyboard road.
Space pauses. Left / Right select a car; B brakes it. R resets. Native sliders also work with arrow keys. Touch a car or use the Brake button. Reset keeps the current experiment and ends any challenge.
Adapted from Martin Treiber’s traffic-simulation.de, using its Intelligent Driver Model. This simplified one-lane playground is educational, not a road-design tool. The model and this adaptation are GPL-3.0; license and complete readable model, engine and interface source are bundled locally.