To each their own, but stop and go traffic does not exist in the absence of stoplights if you leave adequate space in front of you. If you tailgate, ride your brakes, or have to stop completely you are contributing to traffic jams behind you. I drive a 6 speed in one of the worst traffic areas in the US every day.
To all the folks replying that someone will fill the gap in front of you: that’s the point. It isn’t about reaction time. It’s about letting traffic flow easier, not fighting with each other.
It removes the need for your fellow drivers to feel a tension when it is time to switch lanes, to not have to make a risky maneuver. You get to relax when driving because now you aren’t competing to get to your destination, and you can feel more confident others are not going to accidentally hit you in a desperate attempt to go where they are going.
That impatient driver behind you? They will get around you and play the rat race. Let them. Most drivers don’t do that unless you are much obviously slower than traffic flow. Let people win the game they are playing. You are making it generally safer, and your consistency on the road helps them make decisions easier.
I’ve been doing this for about 10 years. No accidents, no cause of accidents, no angry honkers, none of that nonsense. Try it for a week! Give others space to move. Watch traffic jams ease up a little around you. It’s very neat. My space clears spaces so I can move easier after people get in front of me. I’ve seen others follow my example (or be their own example).
You beautiful zen traffic wave surfer you. This, a thousand times this. Somewhere on the web there is a great video of a guy doing this pretty effectively. I guess it's maybe five years old now but worth a watch.
If everyone could just relax out there, some of those traffic standing waves would diffuse away to nothing. Ahhh...
When I get in bad traffic and struggle against the urge to tailgate I play a game where I try and give enough space to where I just roll up to the car in front of me as it is starting to move again. This gives me a time-local goal to aim at instead of fixating on supposed "bad actors" I might want to judge instead.
At least in my city in my commute this morning (~30 minutes), I was forced to hard brake 3 times to avoid having an accident with someone wedging themself in at the end of an exit lane.
I find the problem isn't people merging into your lane in front of you, but doing so badly (ie not leaving a safe amount of space behind their rear bumper and your front bumper).
Are you allowing enough space in front of you for cars to merge in without wedging themselves in front of you?
That's the worst problem I see around here -- cars in the freeway running bumper to bumper, and then a block of 3 or 5 cars also running bumper to bumper trying to force their way in, but none of the cars really leave enough room for a smooth merge, so the cars on the freeway end up hitting the brakes when the merging cars force their way in.
There are some advantages to driving a semi in traffic:
- Lots of gears to choose from and massive torque in order to find that perfect 'idle forward' speed.
- Far more comfortable ride then a car, it's not even close.
- Radio communication with trucks ahead, so you know what's happening ahead and which lane to be in long before the cars figure this out.
- Visibility over the top of vehicles in front (except another truck, obviously).
I think the only thing better than a semi for heavy traffic might be a luxury car with adaptive cruise and a little roof-mounted drone-cam that you could launch to check out the view ahead (though this sounds like something Homer Simpson would dream up). Your own little personal traffic copter/R2D2, with a recharging dock on the roof. Someone please tell Elon Musk to make this a priority for new Teslas. It could even check out side streets in cities and find quicker routes.
I was thinking stop-and-go traffic, which is murder.
Heavy load = longer stop distance = lengthier minimum safe following distance
Minimum safe following distance > 1 car length = motorists darting in front of semis
Rinse and repeat. Assuming a heavy load and ignorant motorists, there's no way to avoid constant unsafe situations. As soon as you create a new safe gap, someone slides in.
So, no. It's terrible. (And I'm not even mentioning the additional gear shifts)
This comes up often, but you gotta think about what would happen if everyone suddenly tripled the gap they leave in front of them. The same road surface would suddenly have 1/3 the throughput. I shudder to think what kind of traffic jam / commute time that would lead to at the edges of the road network.
I do appreaciate when people drive densely packed and I try to do the same (up to a safety limit). For merging there are turn signals.
> The same road surface would suddenly have 1/3 the throughput
At the same velocity. It's quite possible that with the increased gap and increased flow (less stop & go), you could get higher velocity out of it to compensate. Maybe not 3x the velocity, but 2x gap and 2x velocity seems within the realm of possibility (a 60mph road that slows down to 30mph because people are driving stupidly).
Edit: on the low end, this seems quite possible. Increased gaps raising the mean velocity from 5mph to 15 or 20mph.
This is super interesting! As kind of expected, there's a middle zone that balances out density and velocity. In the context of what we were talking about, the fourth "Basic Statement" jumps out at me: "If one of the vehicles brakes in unstable flow regime the flow will collapse."
The problem is people trying to maintain ANY fixed gap. If they learned to treat the gap as a spring and then use their mind as a damper while still maintaining safety, they can cancel out many of the pathological oscillations and standing waves that disrupt traffic flow. This task is also much easier when people learn to monitor the road further ahead than just the bumper and taillights they are following.
Following too closely removes any margin for error and so requires you to either mimic every change in speed or create dangerous conditions.
> To each their own, but stop and go traffic does not exist in the absence of stoplights if you leave adequate space in front of you. If you tailgate, ride your brakes, or have to stop completely you are contributing to traffic jams behind you. I drive a 6 speed in one of the worst traffic areas in the US every day.
Come over to Los Angeles and take me to work for a week and we'll see how well you can make that work.
As someone who drove a stick shift far too often in LA traffic jams, I understand your point and agree with it. You have to try really hard to juuust get to the car in front as it's starting to accelerate or you will burn the heck out of your clutch.
However, if you leave the appropriate gap, someone WILL jump into it in LA. And the people behind you will start frothing at the mouth.
It's really hard to be nice to a clutch in Los Angeles.
This is pure conjecture. You cannot control how traffic behaves, and if you constantly let people go in front of you, people behind you will get irrationally angry (danger exposure).
Yeah you can smooth things out and inject a bit more zen into your experience by accelerating and decelerating more gently and leaving a larger than normal gap, but stop&go simply exists and is a pain even with an automatic.
Nah. When freeway traffic slows, you halve the speed of the vehicle in front of you. Leave 4-5 car lengths between you. Regulate your gas pedal usage so you never have to touch the brakes. You mostly just coast. Sure, there’s one vehicle that will come up quickly behind because that’s how everyone usually deals with it. By the time they slow, wondering why there’s so much space in front of you, they have time to recognize the other lanes are deadlocked and stop-and-go, while the lane they’re in never ceases moving. You’ll notice they start mimicking your movements/behavior. Occasionally, a car in the next lane inevitably thinks they’re going to get somewhere by getting in front of you—let them. They’ll just ride up on the ass of the vehicle in front of you while you again adjust speed slightly to leave the same amount of space. I’ve been driving this way for years and I never see a noticeable effort by the people behind me to get in front of me or ride my ass. People hate stop-and-go-till-you-move-five-feet-then-stop-again. People are happy, however, to be constantly moving, even if it’s only at 10-15mph, passing everyone sitting in the lane beside them.
Adaptive cruise control is easy to achieve no matter the car, and without any technology doing it. You just do it yourself.
This is impossible to achieve since every vehicle has different acceleration and every driver has different response times.
There will always be stop and go traffic once the carrying capacity of the road is reached. Once the capacity of the road is reached, it's actually most beneficial for everyone to be as close to each other as possible, and fill gaps as quickly as possible, since there's a finite amount of road at any given time, so only way to maximize is is to fill up as much if it as possible.
Also why you should use all lanes available and create zipper merge at the very end.
This is arrant nonsense, and is just short of telling everyone who drives in freeway stop and go traffic that they're just idiots who don't know how to drive.
Unless you can control the behavior of adjacent lanes there is no achievable amount of buffer space that eliminates stop and go. The best you can do is increase the glide time between stops. At times you will see, e.g., semis lining up side by side to help keep a zipper merge flowing, etc., but those cases are rare and not understood by other drivers.
> The best you can do is increase the glide time between stops
Do you understand what causes traffic? That harder you brake, the bigger and longer the wave of people braking behind you will be. By braking less hard, you are causing less traffic.
And yes, 99% of people driving in traffic are idiots who don't know how to drive or they wouldn't be tailgating and slamming the brakes every 6 feet wasting thousands of hours of people's collective time by causing needlessly large waves of braking behind them due to the fact that those people are also following too close, amplifying the problem.
I have somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 hours operating a stick vehicle in high congestion traffic. I went to engineering school and studied traffic both academically, and experientially. Yes, I understand traffic better than you do.
Do you understand traffic? I pretty much doubt it.
No, 99% of people driving in traffic aren't idiots. About 5% are, and that's all it takes. My most pleasant finding from all those years of driving was to note that the vast, vast majority of Houston daily commuters were absolutely pro drivers when it comes to congestion.
So how does tailgating people and braking hard and often not make traffic worse? Or is it the same? You didn't explain why you think slowing down more gradually is not better or how tailgating does not cause traffic.
I have more than 35 years driving all kinds of vehicles and what i've learned is that "all the other drivers are wrong" or at least is what everyone says. Probably we all need to learn to better ourselves and be a bit more patient and courteous.
You know what else increases traffic? Merging too soon.
A good friend of mine and I have a standing argument about proper behavior when, driving, one encounters a "lane closed ahead" sign. He insists that the right thing to do is to abandon the to-be-closed lane as soon as feasible [tangent: he also gets mad at drivers who want to merge later, describing them as "cutters"], while I maintain that the best way to minimize the effect of a lane closure is to use whatever lanes are legal/open for as long as possible -- because leaving an open lane of travel unused only exacerbates the problem.
Who's right?
Disclaimer: I grew up driving in the Boston area (yes, among other "Massholes"), and my philosophy is "try never to use your brakes on the highway, and try even harder never to require anyone else to brake unnecessarily".
What's right, if drivers are doing it, is to zipper at the point of the merge.
But that's a big "if" -- too many drivers are like your friend, and work themselves up into a blood-boiling rage at the thought of someone "cutting" by engaging in proper zipper merging. Tell your friend the problem is he's thinking of the merge as a competition with a "winner" (person who ends up in front) and "loser" (person who ends up behind), instead of looking for the option that maximizes efficiency for everyone.
I maintain that the best way to minimize the effect of a lane closure is to use whatever lanes are legal/open for as long as possible -- because leaving an open lane of travel unused only exacerbates the problem.
I agree with you. Fully packing an 'ending' lane until it actually ends is most efficient from a road usage point of view.
(I have lived for 10+ years in the Boston area but did not grow up there.
If everyone merges early, the cars that could have been in that mile of unused lane, will instead be in the full lane, moving the entire queue backwards a mile, clogging up more exits and onramps, and making the jam worse.
Use all available road, that's what it's there for.
FTR, statistically, there's not a whole lot of agency involved. Wish I had a good citation here but IIRC there's almost no difference between real-world commuter traffic and fluid dynamics w/ static "dumb" particles.
I can drive a stick. I borrowed my sister's car for 3 months and drove it on occasion at other times.
I define stop and go traffic as when I'm in 0-15mph traffic during rush hour on the Interstate.
If I leave a large enough gap so that I don't constantly have to press the clutch from stalling then someone else will move in front of me and then I have to hit the brakes as well.
> someone else will move in front of me and then I have to hit the brakes as well
I don't know what to tell you. Works on my machine.
Maybe it's because I don't do it in the left lane but I never see 4+ people force their way in front of me at the exact same time with no time to decrease my speed. The occasional one will buffer out so it works for me.
Enough so you can gradually slow down until they start to move without stopping yourself. Watch how big rig drivers drive in traffic where it is almost required that you don't keep repeatedly stopping.
Big rigs definitely stop in these situations. No matter how much space they try to leave, other drivers speed around them to fill it and they have to stop anyway.
