Permanently closing certain roads in a city can actually make the total traffic for everyone move faster.
March 31, 2026
Original Paper
Antifragility by Design: Exploiting the Braess Paradox for Traffic Management
SSRN · 6497122
The Takeaway
This exploits the Braess Paradox, where adding more options to a network allows 'selfish' drivers to choose routes that collectively clog the system. By strategically removing specific links, you force a distribution of traffic that reduces total travel time and moves the city closer to a mathematically optimal flow.
From the abstract
This paper presents a novel approach for designing an antifragile traffic management strategy based on the detection of the Braess paradox, a counterintuitive phenomenon where removing certain links from a road network can improve overall traffic performance. We propose a methodological framework to identify links whose closure leads to a reduction in total travel time, thereby inducing beneficial system behavior under the user equilibrium condition, which moves the system toward the system opti