When Nash met Markov: Novel results for pure Nash equilibria and the switch Markov chain

Figure 1.1: The A4 highway goes from Amsterdam to the town of Ossendrecht near the Belgium border, with a break around Rotterdam. The extended stretch connecting Delft and Schiedam is the lowest part of the upper blue trajectory (source: www. wegenwiki. nl).Traffic congestion. On December 18, 2015, the first motorists were allowed on an extended stretch of the A4 highway in the Netherlands, that provides a new connection between the cities of Delft and Schiedam [149]. One of the main reasons for this extended stretch was to alleviate the traffic congestion on the nearby A13 highway. Indeed, one might be inclined to believe that extending the road network will always improve the traffic situation. After all, there is more area of road available for the same amount of motorists. This reasoning is mostly true if there would be a centralized entity, say, the Dutch government, that has the power to prescribe the route every motorist has to take in order to get to its destination. The government could assign routes in such a way that the traffic is nicely spread out over all roads, minimizing the total traffic congestion.