Gridlock

Chris Bruce

Atlanta officials are taking advantage of warmer weather by offering to take drivers back to their abandoned vehicles. Thousands of cars were left on roads and in ditches Tuesday when 2.6 inches of snow caused gridlock and chaos around the city.

Tuesday's storm deposited mere inches of snow, barely enough to qualify as a storm up North. And yet it was more than enough to paralyze Deep South cities such as Atlanta and Birmingham, and strand thousands of workers who tried to rush home early only to never make it home at all.

The mood at the 2013 North American International Auto Show has been more than upbeat for automakers. Lots of new models and concept cars have been unveiled and automakers think it will be a good year for a solid sales increase. Quartz writer Tim Fernholz looked at it from another angle, raising some big questions. What i

A car that is sitting still with the engine running is getting zero miles per gallon, no matter how efficient the aerodynamics or how great the hybrid powertrain is. Spread out over the entire U.S., all those zero mile per gallon situations – i.e. traffic jams – means Americans are wasting 1.9 billion gallons of gasoline a year, according to a new Treasury Department report. Another way to look at that is that congested roads cost Americans over $100 billion a year (calculated both a

Between now and the middle of this century, analysts predict that the world's vehicle population will quadruple, going from around one billion today to four billion by 2050. To keep perpetual, global gridlock at bay and reduce consumption, automakers and communication providers have to team up, and that's exactly what Bill Ford Jr. proposed on Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

Bill Ford, Jr. speaks at TED 2011 - Click above to watch the video after the jump

For many city dwellers, the daily commute is usually filled with the same tasks... gas-honk-brake, gas-brake-honk, honk-honk-punch, gas-gas-gas. America's roads are filled and it's hard to imagine them being clogged with an ever-increasing supply of vehicles and drivers. Going against the International Energy Agency, a team of researchers from California thinks we might have already hit "Peak Travel."

We will never complain about our commute again. Ever. According to MSNBC, gridlock traffic has now grown to cover a total of 60 miles between Beijing and Zhangjiakou. It's been that way since August 14th, and officials say that the situation doesn't look to improve until workers wrap up road repairs on September 13. If that wasn't bad enough, a slew of broken-down vehicles and fender benders have cropped up as a result of the slow-going commute.

If you sit in a some gridlock this holiday season, you might come to the end of the line of cars and realize, hey, there's nothing there. No accident, no police on the shoulder, just a bunch of cars that aren't getting where they want to go. Over at the Universities of Exeter (in England), Bristol and Budapest, mathematicians now think they've figured out why this happens (and wastes lots of gasoline in the process).