Braess's Paradox
Add a new road to a congested city and every journey gets slower. Close the road again and the traffic speeds up.
196819 min read
German mathematics
Dietrich Braess
1938
Mathematician at the Ruhr University Bochum, best known for numerical analysis and the finite element method. In a 1968 paper on traffic planning he showed that adding a new road to a congested network can increase everyone's travel time once drivers re-optimise - the effect now universally called Braess's paradox.