Thought of the Day - ToC For Traffic

I just finished reading Rant by Chuck Palahniuk. First off a great book and yet again i wonder why i have left a Chuck Palahniuk book sitting on my shelf for more than a year before i read it.

Secondly i had an interesting thought about one of the concepts in the book. I could be totally wrong but the way i understand it, in the book the government split the population into day people and night people so that the roads would be less gridlocked and accidents would have less of an effect on traffic. But it is an interesting point, even the busiest, most clogged of roads tend to be just about empty between midnight and 6am. So many of the problems that we face with traffic are because we shock-load the roads at certain times of the day. The overall capacity of the roads compared to the total journeys is probably adequate but because everyone is trying to go places at the same time.

In the book the unintended side-effect of the split was that the night people became an underclass that resented the day people but i can't help but think there must be another way to better balance the flow of traffic on the roads. Every time i drive on motorways my mind drifts (more on that in the book too) to Theory of Constraints, i still haven't come up with a way to apply ToC to the roads without a massive overhaul of technology but there must be something that can be done. Strangely leveling the flow across the day hadn't occurred to me before but it would be a great way to remove the need for rigid rules and a drum-beat to pace traffic. Then the question is how to incentivize travel outside of the rush hours to balance the flow without becoming even more nanny-state like.

On the downside if the flow was leveled my 7pm to 3am drives up north would be much less effective.