I found I could "break" the wave by letting a gap grow in front of me that would absorb the wave, and I wouldn't have to brake to a stop (and so my clutch would last longer).
It never occurred to me to write a paper about it :-)
How do you prevent someone from just filling the gap? If it's large enough to absorb the wave, someone will fill it just out of spite.
Besides saving your clutch, you can do this type of brake-early maneuver at stoplights. Decelerating early and coasting at a lower speed means you don't have to stop and can increase your gas mileage significantly.
On further reflection, that's not necessarily selfishness, more that they don't understand what I am trying to do, but there's no way to communicate complex information car to car on a highway.
Bluetooth had started to become standard in all cars, and as I was working on a train project, the idea occurred that if we could link all the freeway cars in series, and treat it as one long train, then I would essentially just have to steer, and we all would avoid brake-waves.
One car only needs to be able to talk to the one car in front of and the one car behind itself.
Which is better: more vehicles on the freeway at lower average speeds - or fewer, faster ones?
This is a problem that can probably be solved someday with self driving cars collaborating to make highways huge coordinated conveyor belts.
Do you not have them in the US?
Additionally the removal of hard shoulders is just dangerous.
Lol, why adopt the UK's variable speed limit when we have already de-facto reinvented the Autobahn....
Also if you WOT a modern car you get the instant response without the ecu calculating pedal angle, comparing to accelerator history, humidity factors etc etc but kiss fuel efficiency bye bye. There are mods and tunes that reprogram the fuel map to cut out this processing time
I also drive a big turbo family sedan and am used to saying 2 Mississippi before the engine pulls at full boar
Unfortunately I cannot find an easy good reference on what exactly that difference is quantifiably. Also many of the Electric cars right now are higher end even sporty vehicles, and more likely to have a throttle mapping that is more direct.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/019126...!
A simplified theory of kinematic waves in highway traffic, part I: General theory
Also:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/019126...!
A simplified theory of kinematic waves in highway traffic, part II: Queueing at freeway bottlenecks
I have read this article and the one before it and it sounds very much like some folks who fell in love with their own idea and got early feedback that it was "working", went all in and never checked to see if it was still working.
The lesson should have been, "When you perturb an emergent system, never assume that the current state is the new steady state."
The most interesting thing for me back when I was in college was a discussion on of the professors on feedback systems gave on LA's freeway systems. There are three major interconnected freeways, 405, 110, and 10 which at the time formed a triangle. Now there is the 105 which cuts off the tip so perhaps a smaller triangle. The professor shared a paper that tracked "brake waves" which were aggressive braking maneuvers that would "propagate" backwards on crowded freeways. The paper showed that at the right time of day, an aggressive braking on any of these three segments could result in your own braking wave to "lap around" and hit you again. Sort of a ringing of the system.
This sort of effect can be present in any system that isn't centrally organized but is instead a result of the interactions within the system. Buying and selling real estate is such a system, especially when you are a 'market maker' in that system.
There are a lot of papers on how HFT trading algorithms interfere (both constructively and destructively) with each other on wall street exchanges. Just interesting stuff in my opinion.