A better writer would start with a description so vivid that it transports you to this very intersection, but this isn’t English class—this is the Vortex. Can we actually quantify the chaos that happens here for two minutes a couple times a school day? We can certainly try.
The biggest problem with the Vortex is that everyone has to go through it. Nearly every class change requires you to go to a different subject, which is oftentimes in a completely separate wing. Anybody trying to get in or out of the B wing has to go through the Vortex. Everyone who goes from music to art or vice versa has to go through the Vortex. Nearly everybody going from a humanities class to a STEM class has to go through the Vortex.
Excluding going to and from lunch as well as arrival and dismissal, there are 16 class-to-class transitions in a four day cycle. I have a pretty standard schedule, with the whole range of subjects—English, math, science, language, social studies—and I have to go through the Vortex for ten of these transitions. Multiply this by the 1200+ students in CHS, and the Vortex is guaranteed to be full at every class change.
The Vortex is a four way intersection, which is practically the worst place to manage heavy traffic flow, and in order to fully understand precisely why it’s so awful, we’ll have to dive into crowd psychology and collective behavior.
Drop a couple strangers into an open space, and they’ll space themselves out similar to particles of a gas. Add more people into the mix and make the space smaller, and you form a crowd that behaves similarly to a fluid. In fact, most sociologists base their models on principles from fluid physics (Hughes, 2003).
A simple example of where you can see this is when you’re walking down a hallway. I’ll bet that you drift toward the right side, along with everyone else walking in the same direction as you. These lanes of people walking in the same direction are called “flows” (Schreckenberg & Sharma, 2002, pp. 21–28).
The most efficient way to move a bunch of people going in different directions is to keep these flows stable. Usually, people will subconsciously form these flows by copying the people around them, but they can be nudged in one direction or another with barriers or signage.
Another example of flows is when you and your friends make a line, one after another, and you snake through the crowd much faster than if you all walked shoulder to shoulder.
These orderly flows all break down when you start making crowds merge at different angles. With right angles, any crowd trying to move vertically finds themselves blocked by groups moving horizontally. The flows become interrupted, people going in the same direction are separated, and it becomes an every-man-fend-for-themselves situation. In a four way intersection, this entire “cross area” becomes clogged with people (Lian et al., 2015).
Most studies on crowd merging are focused on emergency situations, where people are trying to move considerably faster than normal, and you end up with a lot of pushing and shoving. This can lead to bottlenecks (a lot of people trying to move through a tiny opening) and jams. Sound familiar?
High density crowds, especially when panicking, experience the “faster-is-slower” effect: everyone is trying to move faster to get to their destination, which results in clogging as people shove each other and obstruct each other’s paths. Even though everyone is trying to move faster, the average crowd speed is slower than if everyone walked normally.
When studying four way intersections, we can’t really use fluids to model crowd behavior since liquids don’t really have a destination in mind. One experiment studying crowd panic at intersections used ants. It includes one of the best sentences I’ve ever read in a scientific paper—“Panic was induced by injecting citronella oil (insect repellent) into the chamber (that contained ants) which created rapid evacuation with dramatic increase in fleeing speed of the ants”—and uses the phrase “panicking ants” completely seriously (Shiwakoti et al., 2014). In this experiment, ants were relaxing in two chambers before the researchers put insect repellent in them. This resulted in them fleeing, and the two flows met at the intersection.
I think this figure sums everything up pretty well: us CHS students are no better at navigating this intersection than ants are.
If you feel a little insulted in being compared to an ant, here’s another experiment, this time with real life people! In this setup, people were coming in from all four directions and were instructed to walk into the hallway straight ahead (Cao et al., 2017).
These experiments don’t take into account turning into side hallways, but it’s easy to believe that adding turns will result in even more flow interference. (Have you ever tried to turn left into the B wing only to be carried back by a wave of people?)
Now we’ve concretely established why the Vortex sucks: one, people are forced to use it, resulting in heavy traffic, and two, the four way intersection means that crowd flows are interrupted, creating jams. How do we fix this?
We can focus our efforts on the first problem: too many people using the Vortex. To solve this, I propose putting classrooms of the same subject as far away from each other as possible. The odds your next class will be right down the hall go way up if the one wing has English, math, science, and social studies classrooms. If classroom locations are randomized, you won’t have to make the trek all the way to the D wing for math just to go back to the other side of the school for your next class! The only people who might see downsides to this are teachers, who are no longer next to their friends; science students, who now have to do their labs at those single person desks with the chair attached to them; and newcomers, who may find CHS nearly impossible to navigate. However, CHS is nothing if not resourceful and intelligent, and I’m certain that everyone will be able to adapt.
In the case that the above solution is deemed unacceptable, we can tackle the second problem instead: intersecting crowd flows. Civil engineers have found an elegant solution that allows traffic from each direction to go straight, left, or right without stopping. Although commonly reserved for automobile traffic, I believe that replacing the Vortex with a clover interchange (found when two highways intersect each other) would solve our problem quite nicely.
Although it seems like a daunting change, I’m certain the taxpayers of Chatham will see that this is a worthy investment in the name of student sanity.
There’s another way to minimize traffic flow interruptions, although it’s a little less flashy. This is also something you’ll see while driving: a roundabout.
It’s been found that just placing an obstacle in the middle of the cross area of an intersection increases efficiency to 13%. Although it seems strange that adding an obstruction actually makes things more efficient, it actually prompts people to create their own roundabout. Adding barriers in the middle of the hallway also forces people into a designated flow (Schreckenberg & Sharma, 2002, pp. 21–28).
The Vortex is rather small, so I think that adding obstacles would make things worse. But if everyone decides to commit to moving in a roundabout pattern, maybe, just maybe, we can create an uninterrupted flow where everyone can go where they want in an orderly, efficient fashion.
Of course, this is pure fantasy. Under these rules, someone who wants to turn left will have to go all the way around the intersection before they reach their intended destination, and people are much more keen to try turning immediately, no matter how many diagrams you show them. Also, I’m convinced that certain students believe that Shoving the Most People in the Vortex is a game that there are prizes for.
I know I said that this isn’t English class, but there’s a certain aspect of the Vortex that is strangely poetic. It only comes alive at times of transition, and despite its general awfulness, it’s as much a part of the CHS experience as Cougar Weekend or not having a place to eat lunch. Or maybe it represents CHS itself. High school as a whole is a time of transition, and although it’s certainly messy and chaotic, you always break free in the end. If you can manage the Vortex, with its lost AirPods and awful BO, what can’t you do?
And so, the Vortex spins on.
References
Cao, S., Seyfried, A., Zhang, J., Holl, S., & Song, W. (2017). Fundamental diagrams for multidirectional pedestrian flows. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, 2017(3), 033404. https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-5468/aa620d
Hughes, R. L. (2003). The flow of human crowds. Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, 35(1), 169–182. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.fluid.35.101101.161136
Lian, L., Mai, X., Song, W., Kit Richard, Y. K., Wei, X., & Ma, J. (2015). An experimental study on four-directional intersecting pedestrian flows. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, 2015(8), P08024. https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-5468/2015/08/P08024
Schreckenberg, M., & Sharma, S. D. (Eds.). (2002). Pedestrian and evacuation dynamics. Springer.
Shiwakoti, N., Sarvi, M., Dias, C., & Burd, M. (2014). Understanding crowd panic at turning and intersection through model organisms. In U. Weidmann, U. Kirsch, & M. Schreckenberg (Eds.), Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics 2012 (pp. 1175–1183). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02447-9_96
THIS ARTICLE WAS FANTASTIC!!
so slaylicous