I think it has more to do with the suddenness of the stop; each car behind it has to stop suddenly in response, as the change only spreads locally. I’m pretty sure all you need to modify is deceleration speed for braking and acceleration speed to catch back up, to see like 90% of the effect
I’d test it with the simulation but it was too difficult to setup on mobile :-)
Yes. And simply maintaining good following distance gives you a buffer that can absorb this sudden change and prevent the tailback. This is one of the reasons that I long for the day that humans don't pilot cars on the highway.
To-date, if you see a sign saying "40", that basically means there's no traffic flow and you will have to come to a stop very shortly.
If you see a sign saying "60" that means that you probably won't need to stop but you're going to slow to a crawl.
If everyone just did as it said things would probably improve massively.
To some extent this is my confirmation bias, but certainly as often as not the signage is spurious and that's why people don't pay any attention to them. I suspect most people agree with the principal of the things, but every time they obey a sign whilst everyone else flies past, only to discover it was inaccurate it does affect the amount of credence future signs are given.
Essentially you are doing a "smoothing" operation if you proactively reduced your speed ahead of a jam.
Even with regenerative brakes, the regeneration isn't fully efficient. You lose energy to heat. So smoothly traveling one speed is superior.
I respect the idea, but the actual implementation feels a bit half hearted to me. They need to kick in a lot quicker and be more severe, all they seem to do is make a minor improvement and slow people down perhaps a half mile from the actual congestion.
So if the cameras work, we'll have to do exactly what they say or get fined for speeding.
The ones I was referring to are advisory and look like this [0].
[0] https://www.drivingtesttips.biz/images/motorway-advisory-spe...
All / most / some people? Or just the person you responded to?
Just look at politics / marketing / dark patterns / mortgage contracts.
I successfully changed my sister's mind from variable rate mortgage to fixed mortgage, as the language of the contract doesn't explicitly write how bad the worst case option can be 10 years from now for variable rate mortgage.
https://mil.brandenburg.de/cms/media.php/lbm1.a.2239.de/stud...
Please tell me of one road/route in Germany where you can drive '200 km/h for hours straight". I'll settle for tiny values of 'hours', as long as they're >= 1.
For example when Swedes sees a lower speed sign or even just a warning before a road block they will slow and stay in one long lane, while in the mid eastern country I live in until recently everyone just speeds up trying to be first to pass the blocking. The results ? smoother flow and shorter queues, guess where ?
We can try to smooth out this ripple, but if the congestion situation exists for long distances, all it will do is push back the ripple to the end of the congestion.
If people can't follow the process maybe the process is wrong.
Both are valid points one could argue for, depending on underlying values that are not necessarily rational.
It works surprisingly well, both through modulating the speed of traffic and by allowing the hard shoulder to be used at peak times.
Wouldn't it?
If everyone is going 70 mph, it's quite safe. It's the one moron going 50 mph or the one asshole going 90 mph that will cause the crash.
As for wearing out brake rotors prematurely - even with aggressive braking they last more than 50k miles. So on average you'd replace them less often than every 5 years, and they cost around around $250 for a set of four. Doesn't seem like a very good get-rich-scheme for the mechanic.