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In order for everyone to just freaking go, their cars would have to be attached somehow.
I wonder if anyone's ever thought of linking a bunch of cars together so they can all stop and go simultaneously. And hey, since the cars are attached and all need to go to the same place, we can build a track instead of using high maintenance rubber on pavement and-
oop, we invented trains
I love re-deriving the train when people talk about autonomous cars/trucking and how they can already do the highway part easily
What I dont fucking get is that even in Europe where even in shitty countries like Hungary and Slovakia we have train tracks that's about thousandfold what the US has, and we still put shit on Semis and have them drive between cities, cities that are all fucking connected by train.
Why aren't we fucking putting everything on goddamn fucking trains, and then do only the last miles of the delivery on trucks, they could even be electric as that would eliminate all the drawbacks of electric semis, having them only go short distances
And instead of each one having a small engine, we could combine it all into a big one more efficient than separate ones would be!
There is nothing more American than being in traffic. You're never more in touch with a systemic failure, yet we blame it on the choices of individual drivers, all the while unaware that we're part of the problem.
my man have you ever been in, like, another country?
No, but they definitely don't have traffic in Germany. They have the Autobahn, the perfect solution to any and every traffic problem that could ever exist.
I got the sarcasm here, but I think your reply really drove it home for anyone who missed it.
Autobahn can be translated as natural selection. Car drivers there tend to disappear.
It's a little of column a and a little of column b. When I'm driving and some absolute piece of garbage is riding directly next to the car to their right, I equate them to a blood clot, which is funny, because they also make me feel like having an aneurysm. I also don't forgive the driver on the right, because they are more than capable of allowing a space for other drivers to pass.
The absolute lack of awareness on the road is startling. I swear to God, people are looking through straws and their neck doesn't move.
Building extra lanes, though, does not solve the problem.
Traffic dynamics are really interesting. Even after you clear the obstruction, the traffic jam remains and becomes a "ghost jam" that propagates backwards down the road until it eventually fizzles out.
I turned down politeness all the way and watched it become Dallas traffic almost immediately.
Unfortunately, the same thing happens when you turn it all the way up
But they're much nicer about it.
I agree, I think mythbusters did a small scale test in a circle.
The Mythbusters also built a sweet plow truck that would get you through traffic.
Just ONE car can reduce traffic jams. Try it: leave enough buffer such that when the car in front of you stops, you almost reach their bumper at like 5 MPH but never stop b/c it’s time for them to move again. The guy behind you may never actually stop too.
So you had all these stoppers in front of you, and several cars not stopping behind you.
Enough people do this, and there’s no more stop & go. Just cruise 5mph the whole time (not 10, 0, 10, 0, 10, 0, which sucks).
Tried it. Now I'm stopped bumper to bumper with the guy who cut me off to cram his truck into the buffer I left. What's the next step?
Not sure what the problem is. Keep doing it.
This is how I operate in most traffic jams, since I only own manual cars & it's much easier on my leg.
I genuinely don't even remember any specific scenarios where somebody merging in caused me to have to come to a full stop (where I wouldn't have had to stop if they didn't merge). Not saying it never happened, but it was so rare and unnotable that I don't remember.
I do live in the northeast US, so maybe that has something to do with it, but I don't usually feel like I spend meaningfully more time in traffic because I let a few people in front of me.
Bonus benefit: my life is measurably better since I stopped getting pissed about people being in front of me. Road rage had such a broad impact on me, even after I got out of the car.
stopped getting pissed about people being in front of me
The world would instantly be a better place if all the mouth-breathers in it could figure this out simultaneously. Wow, you're pissed off at someone being "in front" of you. That's because there's totally an Earth-shakingly significant difference between having 9,784,326 cars in front of you vs. 9,784,325.
Keep doing it.
For you & @[email protected]:
🏅
Appreciate the affirmation. I’ve long theorized and experimented, glad to have real hoomans give nods.
Honest answer involves deep breaths (at least as one first adopts the method), chuckling at one’s favorite podcast, and recreating the buffer.
On certain roads, monkey see monkey do and eventually folks behind you kinda copy you and there’s a chance fewer and fewer folks will be cutting you off. Notice this most on the longest trips. Perhaps they’re not copying you, btw, rather the most aggressive drivers continually pass you until a small cohort of Big Spacers remain behind you. If some of these Space-Not-Racers are in front and around you too, aggressive drivers passing are passing without cutting you off as much - they have enough space to jam themselves into the bumper of the car in front of you.
Kinda funny going around a curve and seeing a hundred cars bumper to bumper ahead, then checking mirrors to see safe following distances :) (oh yeah this style is safer too not just more efficient!)
Can require some SERIOUS brain hacking. How mad would we be if someone cut in front of us at the grocery store? We’d go butts2nuts in a blink. Gotta just, like, flowww mannnn
If I leave any kind of gap between me and the car in front, it is an inevitability that some jackass will swoop in to cut me off. Happened 7 or 8 times just yesterday. Texas drivers are a menace
That's what it's for, for people to use. Let them, create new buffer. Let somebody else, create new buffer. There is exactly zero wrong with any of this.
Yeah when I do that then every time there's a gap another person comes to cut me off, so it ends up with me pretty much at a dead stop while people go in front of me over and over. People underestimate just how many asshole drivers there are around here lol
It’s okayy, we do the best we can. Congratulate yourself on each person who merges in - you’re the change (instead of “the anti-socials are winning”).
Hopefully saving some $ on brakes & calipers too!
Just one train can reduce traffic jams much more, imagine a bunch if them in different sizes, speeds and even underground some of them.
I learned this technique -- we called it "cutting off the head of the snake".
Traffic moves like water, and becoming fluid and just rolling sometimes can kill traffic completely, I was on a stretch of bright red (5-10 mph) that began moving at 55 MPH after patiently rolling -- there was no actual reason for the traffic jam.
Driving stick, I would do this all the time. In fact, I'd do it in the left lane, which I would never do, but for the fact all of the lanes are just constant stop and go. I'd leave massive buffers, 20-30 cars, and just cruise 5-10mph, and never stop. I just don't understand why anyone wants to use their brakes at all, I hate using my brakes. I'd rather just coast in perpetuity than feel inertia in any direction.
From above the whole thing looks like an accordion. Drivers who tailgate tend to overreact when they see brake lights 50 feet in front of them, compound this by the guy tailgating them and so on. Leave a buffer to absorb this and it smooths out
It takes but an idiot. And 1/10 people on the road are idiots. So that's an idiot every 100m while commuting. There's no surprise.
At least 1/10 of them are idiots.
also, very respectfully to my mom and grandpa (RIP) old people have to stop driving. My mom is 65 and in pretty good shape so she refuses to stoo driving. She only have 2 road modes: Maniac or Tourtle. She'll alone create a standstill in a highway OR she'll almosr kill herself and everyone else on the road. No midle ground
I've been watching traffic patterns for a while... Pretty much since I started driving.
I've wanted to answer the question of why does traffic get so bad sometimes?
The best analysis I can give from all of my observations is.... People SUCK at merging. They don't give space, they try to race to the "front" in lanes that are closing.... Nobody actually knows how to zipper merge properly.
Listen, there's basically two things you need to successfully zipper merge:
For anyone in a lane that's being merged into: make space for merging traffic.
I know legally, that the driver entering the lane will have to find space to merge into, and the drivers in the lane where others are merging into, don't have a legal requirement to provide space, but by being a dickhead about it, you're actively choosing to make things worse for everyone. Just give some space. It's really not hard.
Everyone is more interested in getting somewhere fast, rather than doing things efficiently, in collaboration with fellow road users.... So, when someone inevitably gets cut off by someone who simply must be in front, and they have to slow down, it takes a lot of time for the impact from that showdown, to be recovered by traffic behind the offender.
But trying to re-educate millions, if not billions of drivers to not be horrible at merging, isn't something that's realistically going to happen.
Whenever you hear about "congestion" slowdowns, this seems to be the cause just about every time.
I can actively see this on some highways near me, they have an exit on one stretch of highway through a fairly large city, every mile. I can almost time it for when we get to an exit, vs when we get to an on-ramp, simply by when we slow down or speed up, exclusively due to this phenomenon.
Crashes and wrecks are a whole other issue. Between everyone being shit at merging, all the goddamned rubberneckers, and people making generally idiotic choices to change lanes when they have no idea what is going on..... We're fucked.
I don't hate traffic because it's slow. I hate traffic because it's entirely a product of people being stupid.
There's more to it than that - there's a lot of research involved. Other factors involve:
Chief offender is the cascade effect. Basically, there is a minimum convenient distance one can follow another at a given speed in given conditions. If thee guy in front of them does anything but keep going, they should be able to deal with it without slamming on the brakes.
But if people follow more closely than that, especially because the traffic volume increases, then when car A slams on their breaks, so do cars B, C, D, E, etc. then because everyone's reaction speeds are marginally different, by the time you get to car F, everyone's come to a hard stop, while car A goes on, oblivious that they created a traffic jam that may or may not have been inevitable.
I've had the same fascination!
A video I really enjoyed was a simplified experiment where they had some cars drive around in a closed loop - a single lane circle.
Traffic jams still inevitably somehow popped up, suggesting that we're simply bad drivers haha. Higher level autonomous cars cannot come fast enough.
Drivers love their cars so much they will make traffic jams to spend more time in them.
The CGP Grey video on Traffic is a decent explainer on how traffic happens to begin with and how it gets relieved, kind of like a traffic snake that grows and shrinks, travelling in the direction opposite to traffic.
This City Nerd Video explains how traffic gets exponentially worse as it increases.
It usually starts with someone making a dumb move at a merge, changing lanes or another person forgetting to brake until the very last moment. That's part of the reason I don't see much benefit in adding more lanes to a highway save for very few exceptions, since you'll just have more changing lanes leading to slowdowns and extending a section that was a bottleneck often just shifts the bottleneck somewhere else.
So anyways, I'll keep preaching to the choir: trains, trains, we need more buses and trains.
I will add serious distance to a journey in order to avoid a jam. I will wake at an inhumane hour to avoid traffic. I know it's irrational but sitting in traffic is the worst. My life was so easy when I cycled to work. Literally zero traffic jams for twelve years. Every journey to and from home was fifteen minutes.
they keep switching lanes
How is standing in traffic a real thing? Mfer just pass everyone on your bike!
Me, in an empty bus, standing with people who could just sit in the bus with me so the street would be empty
They have to get up to speed and there are so many on ramps that don't give enough space to actually get up to highway speeds. And some places (like my fucking dumbass city) have 30 of them spaced only 10 feet apart, so you have a lot of people going really slow getting on the freeway, so everyone else has to slow or stop to avoid hitting them.
Quite a few cities in the Northeast are designed this way, because they were done so in the 1950' swith the intent of highway traffic doing 40, maybe 45 MPH through town at maximum. To conserve expensive urban land, they have short ramps and merge areas that were appropriate for those speeds, not to mention the lower overall volume of traffic in those times. And now we're stuck with it, because it'll be a 200 year long court battle to eminent domain the 427 landowners who are all clinging to five square feet each in the patch you'd require for a longer ramp, all hoping for a fat payout to let go of it.
And nowadays, of course, everyone takes it as their god given right to do 90+ MPH on the freeway at all times, and get frothingly pissed off if they can't for any reason whatsoever. So the ramps aren't long enough anymore because no one is using the highway as designed.
