After exhausting inspirations from the ancient townships and modern science, it is now the turn of the ‘ants’ to guide humans plan their future town-systems! Surprised? But, yes the bizarre link has its own convincing logic.
The communal way the ants work in, i.e. in teamwork is perhaps “far more superior” to humans’ individual approach. It is claimed to be to the extend that scientists are now planning to help solve traffic jams and crowd congestion cuing from ants’ movement.
The so-called modern-planned cities we live in can be traced back to the Roman times about 2,000 years ago, when records of congestion in the cities led to banning chariots from the center of Rome.
Explaining the ants’ congestion-challenging activities, Professor Graham Currie from Melbourne’s Monash University said,
Ants will organize their freeways’ so that ants bearing loads are in the middle of the freeway all going one direction, and the ants that are unladen are on both sides of the middle row.
In human crowds there is a tendency to follow the individual in front of you and that creates lots of snakes within crowds … and that breaks down the crowd flow, making it move slower.
Thus, to move further to live in a congestion-free city, the ants’ amazing dealing with congestion for millions of years needs to be studied. It can eventually help control traffic congestion in the exiting large venues, especially after public programs.
So, engineers gear up to be guided by a ‘procession of ants’ to cue from, to design your city-planning projects.
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