Friday night’s “!@#$% Traffic: From Insects to Interstates” panel during the World Science Festival had all the makings of a giant show-and-tell: a merrily provocative title, a wildly diverse collection of topics, and a lineup of much-talked-about speakers.

In introducing the session, held at New York University’s Kimmel Center, festival co-founder Brian Greene called traffic an “annoying problem.” But before long it was harder to care about the annoyance, in the face of the fascinating paths the speakers described to cure it.

The stage was set by Iain Couzin, a mathematical biologist who studies collective behavior in, well, everything: swarms of ants, locusts, cells in tissues and tumors, schools of fish, pedestrians. Where you’d least expect it, he finds simple rules governing how the members of different biological systems move around and interact. Ants that lay down pheromones that others can follow—and so create roads “where and when they need them, on the fly”—are, he said, “one of the wonders of the world.”

Impressively, the panel didn’t just ponder the questions presented by traffic, but leaped into real life problems and solutions. Anna Nagurney (who, like Couzin, studies a dizzying list of systems—the Internet, global supply chains, electric power distribution, and financial networks among them) was grateful for the opportunity to talk about the recent shutdown of stretches of Times Square—done not just to create pedestrian-friendly spaces, but, amazingly, to trim the travel time of drivers, too. That traffic pattern, she said, illustrates a paradox discovered by Dietrich Braess in 1968.
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