3 ms·

I liked the article, but I agree they should have made the way to correct this more clear. They briefly mention to increase you 'headway' in the end. I wish the

by 40four 8y ago

I liked the article, but I agree they should have made the way to correct this more clear. They briefly mention to increase you 'headway' in the end. I wish they would have hammered this point home, instead of waxing poetically about fluid-dynamical models, & detonation waves. The articles you linked do a great job at explaining how to fix this. Thanks for that! I believe this information should be taught as a basic part of drivers education. I intuitively started doing this many years ago. To me, it was obvious. You can see the wave of break lights in the distance, and the wave is slowly moving back towards you. People are so impatient, they insist on riding the bumper of the car in front of them, even in a traffic jam. Then they are caught in the cycle of accelerating quickly, then coming to a full stop. It's a simple fix. Drive slowly and steadily. Keep a large number of car lengths between the car in front of you. If you can manage to maintain the gap in front by the time you come to the back of the next 'jamiton', without breaking or stopping, the Congratulations! You just 'erased' that jam, or the wave of cars coming to a stop in that part of the jam. All of the cars behind you will benefit. And if enough drivers were practicing this, jams would be less & clear up faster. You are right though, the hard part is learning to not care when impatient drivers angrily speed around you, only to run up to the back of the (clearly visible) stopped cars. I just smile and laugh at how silly they are, pat myself on the back for being a smart driver, and a good citizen to all the cars behind me ;)

mattrp 8y ago
My view of jams is they are caused by three expectations drivers have: 1) that the speed limit is still the “minimum speed” recommendation in heavy traffic. Ie, if it’s 65, one can still attempt to drive 74. 2) that the left lane is going to be the fastest in heavy traffic and 3) that somehow using the soon-to-be-closed lane in a lane closure/traffic shift scenario is “skipping the line.” In my view if we had adaptable speed limits /expectations of speed, we could probably avoid jams altogether if everyone agreed that 35mph was an optimal speed for heavy traffic. There would be far fewer brake lights and people would have far better reaction times (provided the slower speed didn’t give them false sense of security leading to checking their cell phones). In any case, try this the next time you’re in a jam- move to the right most lane. Not only is everyone around you doing the opposite (trying to go left for fast), but there are also people exiting the highway altogether... creating a slightly faster moving lane.

by 40four 8y ago

mattrp 8y ago

My view of jams is they are caused by three expectations drivers have: 1) that the speed limit is still the “minimum speed” recommendation in heavy traffic. Ie, if it’s 65, one can still attempt to drive 74. 2) that the left lane is going to be the fastest in heavy traffic and 3) that somehow using the soon-to-be-closed lane in a lane closure/traffic shift scenario is “skipping the line.” In my view if we had adaptable speed limits /expectations of speed, we could probably avoid jams altogether if everyone agreed that 35mph was an optimal speed for heavy traffic. There would be far fewer brake lights and people would have far better reaction times (provided the slower speed didn’t give them false sense of security leading to checking their cell phones). In any case, try this the next time you’re in a jam- move to the right most lane. Not only is everyone around you doing the opposite (trying to go left for fast), but there are also people exiting the highway altogether... creating a slightly faster moving lane.