That's what I thought too until I started practicing this. Probably 75% of the time no one comes into the lane. It takes some practice to find the correct gap size.

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.

I do it for stop signs, too, so I only have to stop once. Especially if it is uphill.

I sometimes do what the gp said - let a gap grow in front of me if I'm in stop-and-drive traffic and get annoyed when someone selfishly rushes to fill the gap in front of me only to have to break 60 seconds later.

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.

I started a job in Fresno in 2013, driving up from LA on Sunday and back down on Friday.

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.

Sometimes they would. But most of the time, they didn't.