Scott Duke Kominers, Columnist

Kominers’s Conundrums: Sizing Up a Stuntman’s Traffic Mess

A traffic jam on the Verrazzano bridge gets a surprise from Evel Knievel. Can you get to the other side?

July 25, 2020 at 3:40 PM UTC

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard University department of economics.

When Evel Knievel cuts a line, he does it his way.
Photographer: Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection

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Even during a pandemic, getting out of New York can be a traffic nightmare. This week, we'll be looking at a particularly bad scenario involving a lot of vacationers and one risk-loving motorcyclist:

I learned this classic brainteaser from my friend and collaborator Alex Tabarrok. One of the things I love about it is that the puzzle comes with so little structure that it’s hard to believe that it has a solution at all. You don’t know how many cars are in line, for example, or whether they all move at the same speed.