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).
I think this wsj vid may contain excerpts from the original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtwY9xKfaYo
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.
Edit: I found it! (from 2008 it appears) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGFqfTCL2fs
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).
Semi drivers have this even worse.
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.
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)
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_diagram_of_traffic...
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."
Following too closely removes any margin for error and so requires you to either mimic every change in speed or create dangerous conditions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/ for further reading
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.
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".
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 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.
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.
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.