Make it make sense
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Taking I-5 into Vancouver from Portland is always horrific. Once you get over the bridge it always clears right up! A big part of that is all the on ramps. There's so many of them! So everybody is having to make way every 10 feet for someone merging in.
It's horrendous.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Yeah they could probably stand to lose the more southern of the two ramp sets at Delta Park, feels very extra and overall unhelpful (And I say this as someone who uses that ramp when headed north). Of course ODOT's solution, beyond replacing the bridge, is to widen I-5 south of the bridge - Which anyone with a brain and 50 years of highway traffic studies can tell us would directly contribute to worsening the problem.
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CGP grey did a video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE
Basically one car breaking too much will make the following brake even more and so on until one stops and there's a jam. There is no clear reason like a road blockage or an accident, just compounding slow down.
I'd recommend this video as a response to that one, cgp greys video is technically correct and fucking dumb at the same time
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This post did not contain any content.wrote last edited by [email protected]
Only ever have to ask, my friend
Heres an overview shot of a traffic pulse.
One person brakes for no reason which leads to everyone else braking. The pulse travels despite there being nothing there. The longer it can take for someone to start up again also can delay the whole thing.
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Yeah, in theory it's great but every time I try it people just cut in front of me then slam on brakes causing me to have to brake then adjust then repeat ad nauseam. People suck.
This is why I thought that maybe it would be good to have some kind of pacing cars, e.g. operated by traffic police? I.e. when you already know or can anticipate that there is a large jam building up, you bring in one pacing car on every lane at an appropriate low speed and everyone has to adjust, so the thing you mentioned won't happen.
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Yeah ideally you put 3 seconds between you and the car in front of you. Gives a nice, springy cushion to not brake as much. Your mechanic will also be surprised how much longer your brakes last.
wrote last edited by [email protected]If you're in traffic (i.e. if you are part of the traffic) and you leave a 3 second gap between you and the car in front of you, another car will drive into that gap. If you back off to create another 3 second gap, it will happen again. Even worse, if you hit the brakes to create that three second gap, even if it's very lightly, you might cause an even worse traffic jam behind you.
I would prefer to leave a big gap to the traffic in front of me, but in many cases 3 seconds simply isn't practical. A car merging into the lane in front of you is inherently more dangerous than a car already being in that lane. If you keep trying to maintain a 3 second gap in heavy traffic, not only do you put yourself in more danger as you keep having cars merging in front of you, you also cause more danger to the drivers behind you by constantly backing off or braking to try to maintain a gap.
It would be absolutely wonderful if everybody believed in the 3 second rule. Traffic would flow so much more smoothly. But, apparently that isn't human nature. And, if you keep fighting for that gap when nobody else believes in it, you can actually make things less safe for yourself and for others.
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3 fucking seconds
The answer is a simple 3 second gap.
That's it, just 3-mississippi (or 3-onethousand) seconds behind the car in front of you and most of the avoidable jams go away.
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You need to give even more space then so that them doing that doesnt make you slow down. People cutting in front of you also helps because those are the assholes causing the brake waves.
Edit: down voters, I'm not saying that he "needs" to do anything as in it is his responsibility or he's to blame. I'm saying that, if he is going to employ this strategy, that making room for pricks swerving in front of you needs to be part of that strategy in order for the desired outcome to happen. If they are making you brake, then your attempts will not work.
I have adaptive cruise with a settable car length and increasing the gap length just makes the cars behind you act more deranged.
I've found the only setting that doesn't make everyone around me fly off the handle is the lowest (one car gap) setting.
I also drive in the diamond lane on long trips and typically have my upper speed limit set well above what the person in front of me is driving.
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Too many people were taught, and still teach, the "two car's length" rule. Which is awful. 2 to 3 seconds is much better and intuitive to figure out.
You say 3, which is great, but I'd settle for 2. Most people on the highways around me leave more like 0.5; I sincerely think the vast majority of people greatly overestimate the amount of space in front of them to the next car.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Two car lengths is ridiculously close. The average car is approx. 4.5m in length. Two car lengths is 9m. The average human reaction speed to visual stimuli is approx 250 milliseconds. At 100 km/h (28 m/s) you would travel 7 metres in that time, and that's just the time for you to notice the stimulus and react, not to choose an appropriate action. If you're 2 car lengths behind and the car in front of you brakes hard, you're going to hit it.
2 seconds behind is 56 metres behind, or 12.5 car lengths. 3 seconds is 18.5 car lengths. Even 0.5 seconds is 3 car lengths. Not enough to safely react to the car in front of you doing something unexpected, but not the tailgating that 2 car lengths implies.
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It's the people not zipper merging correctly. You have idiots entering that are not up to speed and you have idiots breaking for the idiots not up to speed.
On ramps should be required to have their lane not end abruptly which causes the panic. The on ram should continue for at least a 1/4 mile.
idiots breaking
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CGP grey did a video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE
Basically one car breaking too much will make the following brake even more and so on until one stops and there's a jam. There is no clear reason like a road blockage or an accident, just compounding slow down.
Basically one car breaking too much will make the following brake
If the car in front of me started breaking, I'd definitely get out of the way.
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Only ever have to ask, my friend
Heres an overview shot of a traffic pulse.
One person brakes for no reason which leads to everyone else braking. The pulse travels despite there being nothing there. The longer it can take for someone to start up again also can delay the whole thing.
Nope that's just a negative picture of a guy
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So, I don't know exactly how the adaptive cruise control works. But if it is slowing down and speeding up to maintain a specific distance, that does not fix things. The idea is to maintain a specific speed such that, as the people in front of you accelerate and brake, speed up and slow down, you have enough distance to not have to do that. You should essentially match their average speed with enough gap that their braking doesn't put them close enough to your bumper that you have to slow down yourself. Normal cruise control would be better (except mine won't set at speeds under, I think, 20mph) because your speed wont change. Adaptive cruise would make your drive safer, maybe, keeping you from being too close or failing to react to the change in traffic speeds, but I dont think it would solve the traffic issue itself.
You aren't solving traffic as an individual driver anyway. Sorry to burst everyone's atomized bubble here but that's complete nonsense.
If you manually maintain a large gap in front of you, everyone behind you becomes complete weirdos.
We could "solve traffic" by not requiring single occupant car drives to accomplish everything in our daily lives.
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If you're in traffic (i.e. if you are part of the traffic) and you leave a 3 second gap between you and the car in front of you, another car will drive into that gap. If you back off to create another 3 second gap, it will happen again. Even worse, if you hit the brakes to create that three second gap, even if it's very lightly, you might cause an even worse traffic jam behind you.
I would prefer to leave a big gap to the traffic in front of me, but in many cases 3 seconds simply isn't practical. A car merging into the lane in front of you is inherently more dangerous than a car already being in that lane. If you keep trying to maintain a 3 second gap in heavy traffic, not only do you put yourself in more danger as you keep having cars merging in front of you, you also cause more danger to the drivers behind you by constantly backing off or braking to try to maintain a gap.
It would be absolutely wonderful if everybody believed in the 3 second rule. Traffic would flow so much more smoothly. But, apparently that isn't human nature. And, if you keep fighting for that gap when nobody else believes in it, you can actually make things less safe for yourself and for others.
If you're still moving with traffic, why do you care that someone got in front of you? If you're slowing so much that lots of people are getting in front at one time, then you're the obstacle. A 3 second gap changes with speed, if it's slow traffic that's less than a car length. And if some asshole muscles their way into a gap unsafely, let them. You'll still get to your destination far faster than if you hit each other or cause some road rage stupidity because of who is in front.
Driving brings out the worst in people for no gain at all.
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https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/9/4278
TLDR: modeling traffic as a gas leads to fairly accurate predictions. If that doesnt mean anything to you, here's a decent visualization of how gasses move around in a system. In this analogy, each of the gas particles models a car on the road. https://youtu.be/Hr5Baj3lXFA
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This post did not contain any content.wrote last edited by [email protected]
slow speeds cause accidents, not speed, it it the sudden stop, the cause of some inbred driver
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I don't always hang out behind a semi when just doing daily driving, but I will 100% camp out behind one when pulling my trailer - massive fuel savings from reduced wind resistance.
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If you're in traffic (i.e. if you are part of the traffic) and you leave a 3 second gap between you and the car in front of you, another car will drive into that gap. If you back off to create another 3 second gap, it will happen again. Even worse, if you hit the brakes to create that three second gap, even if it's very lightly, you might cause an even worse traffic jam behind you.
I would prefer to leave a big gap to the traffic in front of me, but in many cases 3 seconds simply isn't practical. A car merging into the lane in front of you is inherently more dangerous than a car already being in that lane. If you keep trying to maintain a 3 second gap in heavy traffic, not only do you put yourself in more danger as you keep having cars merging in front of you, you also cause more danger to the drivers behind you by constantly backing off or braking to try to maintain a gap.
It would be absolutely wonderful if everybody believed in the 3 second rule. Traffic would flow so much more smoothly. But, apparently that isn't human nature. And, if you keep fighting for that gap when nobody else believes in it, you can actually make things less safe for yourself and for others.
"if you leave a 3 second gap, there will be enough space for others to safely merge into that space as they need to"
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3 fucking seconds
The answer is a simple 3 second gap.
That's it, just 3-mississippi (or 3-onethousand) seconds behind the car in front of you and most of the avoidable jams go away.
Except the person next to you or behind you gets frustrated and cuts you off and you have to hit the brakes and create a traffic pulse.
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3 fucking seconds
The answer is a simple 3 second gap.
That's it, just 3-mississippi (or 3-onethousand) seconds behind the car in front of you and most of the avoidable jams go away.
If you do that, someone will move into the gap. If someone moves into the gap you can slow down to make another gap to them, but then someone else will drive into that gap. I don't know of any major city where you can maintain a 3 second gap during rush hour.
Even worse, if you ever brake to try to create a gap, you're likely to cause a traffic jam behind you.
Sure, if everybody did follow the suggestion and allowed a 3 second gap you wouldn't have traffic jams, but that's just not human nature, apparently.
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Except the person next to you or behind you gets frustrated and cuts you off and you have to hit the brakes and create a traffic pulse.
Well yes, society functions only with cooperation. Uncivil behaviour ends with violence and dismay.
However 3s usually allows for slow adjustments which alleviate caterpillaring.
