3 ms·
Every advocate always has their pet theory as to why their method works better than others. They also have "evidence" which is either completely anecdotal or do
by saosebastiao 13y ago
Every advocate always has their pet theory as to why their method works better than others. They also have "evidence" which is either completely anecdotal or does not control for even the most obvious of factors (such as rate of queue arrival or average speed in the constrained resource).
Simply put, they are all wrong. A bottleneck is a bottleneck and there is no fairy dust magic queueing technique that works better than another. At best, some techniques might have a behavioral advantage...but I stress again, they are all inconsequential. We are talking tens of seconds of time savings at best.
- icarus_drowning 13y agoLate merging makes better use of available road bandwidth. That's not anecdotal, that's simple math.
- ronaldx 13y agoLate merging makes more effective use of the car waiting area, at the expense of a faster flow.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoSo you mean the flow through a straw is better than through a funnel?
- abstrakraft 13y agoBandwidth is probably the wrong term here. It keeps traffic from backing up as far, true, but this really only matters to people who are turning off before the merge. Ignoring early exits, at steady state, the only thing that really matters is flow _after_ the merge - that's what determines the rate at which traffic passes the restriction.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoI would never try this myself mind you; I hate pissing people off in the road in the states and I'm happy to outsource my driving to a taxi driver in china. However, it's a simple matter of utilization, if everyone waited properly in line, traffic would seize up in Beijing as many intersections would become blocked by single lines of cars next to empty unused lanes. We are talking about saving minutes, 10s of minutes, or even days [1]. Funny how Americans haven't seen real traffic before and think they know the right global solutions. [1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/08/23/129376194/traffic-jam-beijing-tibet http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/08/23/129376194/tra...