What we can learn about crowd behavior by watching the Tour de France

Enlarge / Cyclists hit the 18th stage between Trie-sur-Baise and Pau, southwestern France, in the 2018 Tour de France. (credit: Jeff Pachoud/AFP/Getty Images))

Check out the aerial footage of bicyclists competing in the annual Tour de France and you'll notice that riders tend to spontaneously group themselves into a diamond-shaped pattern. Jesse Belden, a researcher at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, says such patterns emerge because riders are trying to stay close to their competitors while avoiding collisions.

Belden, an avid cyclist himself, described his work at a meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics in Atlanta, Georgia. While watching coverage of the Tour de France, especially the aerial footage, he became fascinated by the formations of the group of cyclists. They resembled flocks of starlings or schools of fish-both examples of so-called "collective behavior" in nature. And he found himself wondering how one might model the behavior of riders in a peloton.

The study of swarming and other collective behavior in animals is a booming field, with scientists studying the group dynamics of murmurations of starlings, ubiquities of sparrows, swarms of midges, armies of fire ants, and schools of fish, among other examples in nature. The aim is to better understand the underlying mechanisms, with an eye toward identifying possible universal laws governing such behavior-a task made more difficult by the fact that there are slightly different mechanisms behind the collective behavior of each of the aforementioned groups.

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