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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 b

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.

tedunangst 8y ago
How much space do I need to leave if the car in front of me is stopped?
- 0x00000000 8y ago
  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.
  - pluto9 8y ago
    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.
    - lobf 8y ago
      Sometimes they do, more often than not they aren't stopping, and somehow they seem to do better time than me on top of it.
jhayward 8y ago
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.
- 0x00000000 8y ago
  > 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. See http://trafficwaves.org/ http://trafficwaves.org/ for further reading
  - jhayward 8y ago
    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.
    - brenschluss 8y ago
      What do you think about this article? https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607841/a-single-autonomous-car-has-a-huge-impact-on-alleviating-traffic/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607841/a-single-autonomou...
    - 0x00000000 8y ago
      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.
    - neuralRiot 8y ago
      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.
r00fus 8y ago
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. Adaptive cruise is a godsend.
- bobwaycott 8y ago
  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.
  - ntsplnkv2 8y ago
    > Adaptive cruise control is easy to achieve no matter the car, and without any technology doing it. You just do it yourself. The whole purpose of cruise control is to not do it yourself.
- brenschluss 8y ago
  Here’s an experiment proving this idea: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607841/a-single-autonomous-car-has-a-huge-impact-on-alleviating-traffic/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607841/a-single-autonomou...
lizknope 8y ago
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. No thanks. Automatic for me.
- 0x00000000 8y ago
  > 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.
pluto9 8y ago
If you leave more than a few car lengths between yourself and the next guy at rush hour, someone will quickly fill that gap.
Xurinos 8y ago
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).
- foobarian 8y ago
  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.
  - tonyarkles 8y ago
    > 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.
bsder 8y ago
> 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.
lotsofpulp 8y ago
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.
whateveracct 8y ago
Yeah if _everyone_ left adequate room, but that just is never gonna happen.

tedunangst 8y ago

How much space do I need to leave if the car in front of me is stopped?

0x00000000 8y ago
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.
- pluto9 8y ago
  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.
  - lobf 8y ago
    Sometimes they do, more often than not they aren't stopping, and somehow they seem to do better time than me on top of it.

jhayward 8y ago

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.

0x00000000 8y ago
> 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. See http://trafficwaves.org/ http://trafficwaves.org/ for further reading
- jhayward 8y ago
  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.
  - brenschluss 8y ago
    What do you think about this article? https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607841/a-single-autonomous-car-has-a-huge-impact-on-alleviating-traffic/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607841/a-single-autonomou...
  - 0x00000000 8y ago
    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.
  - neuralRiot 8y ago
    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.

r00fus 8y ago

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. Adaptive cruise is a godsend.

bobwaycott 8y ago
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.
- ntsplnkv2 8y ago
  > Adaptive cruise control is easy to achieve no matter the car, and without any technology doing it. You just do it yourself. The whole purpose of cruise control is to not do it yourself.
brenschluss 8y ago
Here’s an experiment proving this idea: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607841/a-single-autonomous-car-has-a-huge-impact-on-alleviating-traffic/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607841/a-single-autonomou...

lizknope 8y ago

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. No thanks. Automatic for me.

0x00000000 8y ago
> 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.

pluto9 8y ago

If you leave more than a few car lengths between yourself and the next guy at rush hour, someone will quickly fill that gap.

Xurinos 8y ago

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).

foobarian 8y ago
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.
- tonyarkles 8y ago
  > 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.

bsder 8y ago

> 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.

lotsofpulp 8y ago

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.

whateveracct 8y ago

Yeah if _everyone_ left adequate room, but that just is never gonna happen.