A simple hypothesis like this is easy to test: does stop and go traffic exist in places that are predominantly manual transmissions?
I live in Asia and I can tell you unequivocally that, yes, stop and go traffic still exists even when every single person has a manual transmission.
Like on a motorbike I tend to tweak slow speeds with the clutch only and leave the throttle in one position most of the time.
With an automatic car since the brakes are not binary and automatic gearboxes have often forward creeping I only tweak the brakes. Helps to force the gearbox into 2nd gear as well for even slower creeping.
In fact, I think automatic gearboxes reduces traffic jams as fewer parts to think of so less likely to accidentally make a mistake and cause congestion.
Wonder how many jams are due to accidental stalling a manual gearbox.
Traffic jams without an automatic gearbox is no fun. (or even less fun)
If, left in drive gear, yes. However, many cars have several options.
In my current car, a Honda, rhe lowest gear will just creep along, next gear up will slow the car rapidly on gas pedal release.
Both gears are very well chosen for traffic. I rarely apply brake.
Not with the regenerative braking in my hybrid.
The simple solution is to behave like an inductor in electronics; if the front car starts, take a bit of time to get going and don't try to maintain the gap. That way you average out the speed of the stop-and-go traffic more than if you were maintaining distance.
It might help to think of stop-and-go as a wave of stop-traffic through go-traffic where the reaction time of drivers shortens or lengthens the stop-traffic duty cycle. If a driver maintains enough distance to eat an entire stop-cycle without stopping themselves, they have effectively nullified the stop-wave. If they can't do the entire cycle they can still help in reducing the duty cycle of the stop wave.
I worry there's a sampling bias going on.
When I commuted to work, I'd keep the same tight pattern everyone else used, and it felt like any time I let up, some jerk would take advantage.
Then, for a while, I was suddenly paid to go between buildings on opposite sides of one of the worst traffic cities in the US. I always left with plenty of time and no urgency, so I would just stubbornly maintain plenty of stopping distance while everyone else was inches apart. Smoothing my braking pattern became a game.
If you constantly leave that much room people weaving in becomes rare enough that you barely care when it happens.
I feel like there's some bias affecting perception. Maybe it's a confound, or availability heuristic.
Confound - if you're trying to hug a bumper, and suddenly there's a gap, maybe that's because your lane is suddenly moving faster and someone's taking advantage of that. If you always have space, you'll have it even when your lane is less attractive. (ie, The space doesn't make your lane attractive, the pace does.)
Availability heuristic - if you care about people cutting you off and are adopting a strategy to prevent it, you will notice it more and put more weight on those occurrences than on all the seconds where no one is cutting you off.
Before I had that job, I would have read this comment and thought it was nuts though, so not sure if anyone will actually believe me.
I swear I've watched traffic clear up around me. Of course it's anecdotal, but it tends to keep things moving, even if slowly, rather than bringing everything to a halt.
Driving in traffic is a cooperative activity. The only times you don’t need to accommodate and be accommodated by other drivers are when there are hardly any around.
Almost exclusively these people will zip around a line and force their way in at the end. Even kindergartners are taught budging in line is not good.
Why is this the problem on the people actually being considerate and are in the correct lane at the appropriate time?
Zipper merging [0] exercises a different kindergarten skill, taking turns. Still, "lines" are a small minority of lane-changing situations, all of which involve taking the open space in an adjacent lane.
"Lines", to use your emphasis, are by far the major time component so for me this is a meaningless distinction. Normal traffic merges should of course be accepted gracefully.
I find it inconsiderate frankly, because it forces an arbitrary decision rather then just patiently using the available road as marked.
https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/mark-phelan/2018/07/0...
We should mostly be on bikes and scooters anyway.
That being said, in some European cities drivers are not very keen to stop for pedestrians in crosswalks, even when pedestrians are already in the median "island." I haven't noticed any US city of a similar size that had drivers quite so negligent about crosswalks.
We were taught that squeezing in is forbidden unless you're heading for an exit or something like that.
Same thing with an automatic transmission. With DSG it's obvious why, but even with a torque converter you tend to have a clutch that locks up once there's no need for slip to improve efficiency.
If that’s the case then it should eventually be solved by a critical mass of vehicles with adaptive cruise control (assuming they optimize for fuel efficiency and/or smooth acceleration/braking)
I coast nearly as much with it as I did using a manual.
I find I'm usually able to keep rolling in gear, which doesn't use any more fuel than just idling, and not apply the brakes in most "stop and go" traffic.
I truly believe that stop and go is caused by automatics. All of the brake tapping tends to bunch people up at the end of long lines forcing them to a complete stop. In a manual just let off on the gas a little and the engine brakes a little, no brake lights to create cascading braking