Fast track.

PARIS (France); FRANCE

"Down with the deadly rhythm of the production line," proclaimed the revolutionary posters in Paris in 1968. In reality, those French demonstrators had less to complain about than they thought, because when you look closely industrial production lines often do not have much rhythm at all. In fact, the whole notion that automated assembly lines are relentlessly efficient is a fallacy. Dirk Helbing, a physicist at the Dresden University of Technology, had previously helped pioneer the understanding of traffic flows, and the insights and models that he and other physicists have provided are changing the way German roads are managed. In traffic all the responses are "local," a driver can only see and adapt to what the vehicles nearby are doing in a production line it is possible to monitor what is happening further away in the process and to take that long-range information into account.