Ant Colony, Traffic Flow, and Urban Design

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As our cities grow and the population blooms, we saw how our roads became packed with cars and traffic worsen. Our daily travel or commute became too much of a hustle. Urban planners find means to ease it, but we only see little success due to inherent issues on the unpredictability of factors influencing what causes it. We always seek a better way to design road and transport networks to curves out traffic and have an optimal operation.

Understanding the science behind traffic tells us a different story, and grasping every factor seems an insane task to do. Collectively, it is diverse, from ecology and human behavior to network and urban design. It seems a daunting task with countless insights that aim to find novel ways to keep our roads free up. We can observe nature and find inspiration to solve road and transportation network issues from ants' superb colonial organization and operate optimally.

Despite their little bodies, ants are successful species that colonized every place except for Antarctica. We can see them as we walk down the sidewalks or crawling in our walls. They aided other plants and animal species in their evolution. Ants may be aggressive to other species, but they cooperate well with their colony, which is a primary cause of why they strive to live. Ant colonies exhibit an outstanding complex behavior that sets them apart from other species. They lived by strength in numbers, which collectively they can weigh more than all humans.

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A Leaf-cutter ant with insane coordination | Photo by Geoff Gallice

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An ant bridge showing cooperative behavior. | Photo by Igor Chuxlancev

Stephanie Sammann explains the biology of ants and the ant colony. Sammann explains what make ant special to be able to pull off such magnificient feat of a social insect | Video from The Real Science


Complex, as it seems, but the ant colony is orderly. Ants colonies have each member a task to fulfill. They have the worker ants, which are non-reproductive, that work to provide food, shelter, and defense for the colonies, while the reproductive ant exists to serve as royals that in a latter can start their colonies when the queen dies. Polymorphism exists vividly in the ant colonies. Soldiers have bigger sizes as compared to other worker ants to defend their ant colonies. Medium size worker ants dig tunnels and collect food or garbage, while smaller ones cultivate and collect fungus. What makes ants outstanding is peculiar traits to communicate with flawless synchronicity despite their seemingly poor vision and hearing.

In 1962, entomologist EO Wilson discovered how ant communicates by observing how ants relay information to others to reach the source of food and the biology of the ant that makes it possible. Wilson noticed that ants tap their abdomen to the ground while traveling from the food source back to the colony, and when they meet others along the way, they tap antennae to one another. Wilson stumbled upon the Dufour's gland that was vital in decoding how ants communicate. The gland release different pheromones to relay information to others. It seems the ants are creating chemical trails from the food source back to the colony so that others can trace it.

Combining physical gestures and phenomenal language, the ants created a complex but effective communication system. They have a unique combination of signals that resemble syntax in our language. Aside from their ability to establish communication, ants built together with a home that seems an architectural feat full of rooms with roofs, walls, and floors. When traversing to the food source, they can build bridges by chaining their bodies when the passage has water in it. These structures and actions gave us an insight into how ants effectively assign labor.

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Black ant's trail as it moves across a muddy pond. | Photo by Dotun

Deborah M. Gordon provided an insight on what is inside the ant colony. Gordon discuss ant mate, communicate and source food, shedding light on how their actions can mimic and inform our own behavior. | Video from Ted-Ed


Ant has eased in going back and forth from their nest due to outstanding traffic management. They even managed narrow chemical trails, but somehow traffic flow is smooth even in rush hours. Scientists studied the traffic flow in ant colonies and found ants construct and maintain roadways similar to ours with fixed width and free from an obstacle. Christiane Hönicke observed that the more crowded the trails were, the more ant sped up about 25% in and out of the ant colonies, but collision became frequent, which we can't provably emulate.

One outstanding feature of ant's trails is that lanes evolved as the route became crowded. Researchers also discerned that ants give enough headways for ants to react to untoward situations and lowers traffic jams. We can have a zipper system to reduce congestion in our roads when merging two lanes, but it is still affected by drivers' behavior. Ants can find shorted possible routes between their colonies and the food source. We can expect ants to jams the trail similar to our highway, but ants find alternate routes every time they start to clog. We can observe ants still managed to have smooth traffic without jams even with narrow tunnels route. Ants' self-regulation is exceptional in that they keep adapting to new rules as things get crowded.


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Adapting Ant behavior in finding the optimal road plan for farm to market (in terrains). | Photo by K.V. Arya

James Gorman explains how we can avoid traffic like ant with a simple experiment. He gives better insight on traffic planning.| Video from The New York Times


Aside from smooth traffic, we can learn from ants how we establish our cities. Ants build colonies near food sources. When I say near, ants seemingly consider the optimal distance between a food source and have less risk for predators and unfavorable conditions. Ants create a transport network that is optimal and resembles our transport network but seems costly to build. We can study how ants built their network and mimic the rules embedded in the ant network that will be cost-efficient.

Urban designers and planners can adapt it to design our road network and our energy and water grids in our cities. It ensures that the access to essential goods and services is at an optimal distance to us, and it helps lessen the cost of both water and electricity but is still efficient. Studying collective behaviors of ants and ant colonies give us better insight on how to plan with optimality and efficiency in mind.

We draw parallels to our system and nature, which nature hone for billion of the year. Urban designers and planners can tap into it to make our cities better. Ant reminded us that collective efforts win big time. It is how they strive for years despite their poor vision and hearing. Biomimicry addressed functionality and aesthetics pretty much to every design, whether for cities, architecture, or engineering. The ants' colonies teach us to design better networks in our cities.


Readings

  1. Abe Perez and Sarah Diamond, Idiosyncrasies in cities: evaluating patterns and drivers of ant biodiversity along urbanization gradients, Journal of Urban Ecology

  2. Laurie Winkless, Studying swarms of ants could help speed up your commute, Wired

  3. A. Bottinelli et al., Local cost minimization in ant transport networks: from small-scale data to large-scale trade-offs, The Royal Society



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23 comments
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Architecture designs are good to make better use of space ant that too making is convenient for us again because of increasing traffic it has its limitations too. Thanks for sharing this nice post

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Yes, designs should make use of the space optimally and efficiently. Also, traffic can hinder us to do well in our day-to-day activity. Thank you for appreciating the post and for taking time engaging to it. Have some !PIZZA

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Again, Mother Nature usually has all the profound answers when it comes to human problems such as the complexities in the design of urban spaces and cities. It's surely a great move that architects, designers, as well as scientists have been studying the humble ant colony to source inspiration for our traffic issues, Effective solutions that are harnessed from our natural habitats are usually winning formulas for further environmental progress!

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Yes, I agree that learning from nature and mimic nature (back with years of natural evolution) is a winning formula to our persistent problem in design. That is why I have a peculiar interest with biomimetics and biophilic. Our traffic woes may a long way to curve but we are pointing in the correct direction. !PIZZA

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@storiesoferne! I sent you a slice of $PIZZA on behalf of @juecoree.

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Exactly, like you, I also have a keen inclination to the natural sciences of biomimetics, biomimicry, and biophilic design as all these wonderful disciplines contribute to a much better world. Thanks for the yummy pizza!

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(Edited)

Dear @juecoree, Your idea is fantastic! By the way, The network of ant societies has a different driving force than that of human societies!
Ant societies can have such efficient transport and communication networks because only the queen ant can leave offspring!

Can you be the ant queen of human society?😄

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Hahaha. Nope, too much of a burden. Ant colonies seem peculiar. I think human can't lived how the ant lives. Having some Queen seems illogical and having one person to reproduced quite nah. !PIZZA

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Dear my friend @juecoree, What is the current state of coronavirus in the Philippines?
South Korea needs to new vaccinate people again because of the spread of the variant coronavirus.
It's terrible to have to wear a face mask in the hot summer weather. It is questionable whether it is necessary to get a corona virus vaccine.

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At where I am located, the cases seems controlled but some part of the country have high cases. Yeah, it is terrible to wear mask during summer (been through that one a months ago).

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Since South Korea currently bans gatherings of more than five people, black humor is popular saying that there will be more people who die of hunger than those who die from coronavirus.😅

Currently, the South Korean government is paying US$800 to the poor familys to prevent people dying of starvation.

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That would be the case if lockdown continues for a long run (hopefully not). It is a good thing that your government is providing some cash influx to at least keep the Korean afloat financially. Hopefully, things settle down with this virus and not drag for too long. It is more than one and a half that we are addressing this.

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Communication between ants has always fascinated me, how they are in sync and how the ant trail moves in an organized manner. How a crumb on the kitchen counter is infested by them in several minutes. How they were able to get to that so fast and how their radar is so sharp. We have so much to learn from them. Any thoughts if the ant system could solve our busy EDSA?

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Any thoughts if the ant system could solve our busy EDSA?

It is viable to adapt the ant colony to optimized traffic flow in EDSA, but it may not be the right solution. As I observed, EDSA traffic induced by multiple factors like population density, no. of cars, peoples behavior, no. of intersections, to name a few. Ant's trail are adapted that they have mutual respect to allow others to join or merge in an crowded lane. But for us, some are not really discipline in the road and always takes pride of being the first one (not even allowing others to merge through a junction or intersection). Going back to whether ant system could solve the EDSA traffic, it is provable option to take but we need more discipline and coordination from our people, authorities and the industries along EDSA. !PIZZA

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Good point regarding the discipline required--something that we need to learn from ants as well.

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