Braess's Paradox - Example

Example

Consider a road network as shown in the adjacent diagram, on which 4000 drivers wish to travel from point Start to End. The travel time in minutes on the Start-A road is the number of travelers (T) divided by 100, and on Start-B is a constant 45 minutes (likewise with the roads across from them). If the dashed road does not exist (so the traffic network has 4 roads in total), the time needed to drive Start-A-End route with A drivers would be . And the time needed to drive the Start-B-End route with B drivers would be . If either route were shorter, it would not be a Nash equilibrium: a rational driver would switch routes from the longer route to the shorter route. As there are 4000 drivers, the fact that can be used to derive the fact that when the system is at equilibrium. Therefore, each route takes minutes.

Now suppose the dashed line is a road with an extremely short travel time of approximately 0 minutes. In this situation, all drivers will choose the Start-A route rather than the Start-B route, because Start-A will only take minutes at its worst, whereas Start-B is guaranteed to take 45 minutes. Once at point A, every rational driver will elect to take the "free" road to B and from there continue to End, because once again A-End is guaranteed to take 45 minutes while A-B-End will take at most minutes. Each driver's travel time is minutes, an increase from the 65 minutes required when the fast A-B road did not exist. No driver has an incentive to switch, as the two original routes (Start-A-End and Start-B-End) are both now 85 minutes. If every driver were to agree not to use the A-B path, every driver would benefit by reducing their travel time by 15 minutes. However, because any single driver will always benefit by taking the A-B path, the socially optimal distribution is not stable and so Braess's paradox occurs.