Brick Technology

Why Traffic Jams Happen (with LEGO Cars)

​In this video, I build a circular road system with 22 LEGO cars to recreate real traffic flow and find out when traffic suddenly breaks down. Each car is programmed to behave like a human driver, reacting to the distance of the car in front by braking and accelerating. By gradually adding more cars, a surprising result appears: at a certain point, traffic becomes unstable and a traffic jam forms out of nowhere. I also tested different types of drivers, including normal human drivers, distracted drivers, and self-driving robot cars. The results show how even small differences in behavior can completely change the flow of traffic. The system uses a magnetic guidance mechanism inspired by Miniatur Wunderland, where vehicles follow hidden steel tracks inside the road. The road system was fully 3D printed using a Bambu Lab H2D and designed in Shapr3D. This experiment is inspired by the famous traffic flow experiment by Yuki Sugiyama. Software for programming the cars: https://pybricks.com/ 3D Printer: https://bambulab.com/en/series/h2 BrickController2 (App to use Gamepad with Lego): https://bit.ly/3JypnV0 Where I get my Lego parts from: https://www.bricklink.com/v2/main.page 00:00 Motor 00:58 Steering 02:01 Design 02:26 Street 03:08 more cars 03:36 Human driver 05:46 Robots 06:42 ? 07:20 vs robot 08:14 me vs human 08:39 fast Music: Addict (Instrumental) - NEFFEX(1) The Awakening - Patrick Patrikios Cherokee Shuffle - Nat Keefe & Hot Buttered Rum Manic - Jeremy Korpas Waltz of the Flowers (by Tchaikovsky) - Tchaikovsky(1) #bricktechnology #legotechnic​ #lego #asmr #buwizz #engineering