Sig alert, parking lot, traffic jam---whatever you want to call it, it’s a hassle. The troubling scene of bumper to bumper traffic is all too familiar to all of us here in Los Angeles. But when you’re stuck in this situation, you probably don’t consider yourself as part of a traffic community. And that’s a problem.

“People are actually very interdependent, but they don’t necessarily perceive themselves to be interdependent. When people are not interdependent, or don’t perceive that they’re interdependent, they often act more selfishly,” Andrea Hollingshead, an expert in group dynamics, said.

Hollingshead says traffic patterns can be explained by examining the dynamics of the group as a whole.

"There’s something called an information cascade,” she says.

The best example of this is when vehicles are merging in to traffic from an on-ramp. As they move in, traffic in the right lane is naturally slower. So, everyone moves left.

“Everybody’s responding to the same stimuli, in the same way, and they’re not coordinating,” Hollingshead said.

Unfortunately, the problem has also been taken to the streets.

“The congestion we see on the city streets comes from trying to move vehicles through intersections,” Jim Moore, who studies L.A. traffic patterns, said.

He says that finding a solution means working together.

“If there’s one improvement I could suggest, it would be that they do more of this together. Right now the people who do the freeways only worry about that. Once you get on or off, they’re no longer interested in you,” he said.

The Mathematical Society of Traffic Flow in Japan conducted an experiment to model real-life traffic situations. Their research explains how some traffic jams start for no reason at all.

The experiment shows that even though traffic is moving, it is still slow as each car waits until it is a reasonable distance from the car in front of it before it starts going. This spreads the jam backwards at a rate of about 12.5 MPH.