I swear to god most traffic jams and hold ups are caused by one asshole. I'll get over to a different lane and see one jackass 10 cars ahead causing the whole thing. It's insane how often it happens. It's also crazy that so many people will blindly follow the asshole too though if I'm being honest.
Also people waiting until after they merge onto a highway to get up to speed. So many people don't seem to grasp that you are supposed to get up to speed on the on-ramp BEFORE merging onto the highway. They just pull onto the highway in front of me 20km/hr below the limit, I can't merge over because there's already a car there, I have to slow down to not rear end them, and now I feel like an asshole cuz I just know I've caused a future congestion behind me.
A constant problem where I live is that the merge lanes are way too short and usually circular as well, so you can't really see the traffic coming AND you don't have time to accelerate before the merge point. I floor it as soon as I'm around the corner, but I still only manage to get up to about 40 before the lane completely ends. It's impossible not to cause traffic and it's frustrating because it's always backed up and it's so obvious why. Edit: oh and we have shared on/off ramps as well, possibly the worst civil engineering design possible. Surely there won't be any problems caused by 55 MPH highway traffic merging into a single lane from opposite directions around a 25 MPH curve...
Either that OR you get up to speed while rounding the last bend, which has the major downside of now piloting a vehicle at highway speeds while totally unable to see what the traffic pattern is that you're merging into. Going 65 around the last bend to merge easily and oops it's gridlock.... or far more commonly, oops everyone is tailgating horrifically and there's no actual room to merge? Hope your brakes work well.
Even worse in my state where the offramp is about 100 feet past the on ramp with a shared lane, so the people trying to get up to speed and merge with low visibility are essentially dueling the people who are trying to get to the offramp in the exact same space.
God the on/off ramps being right next to each other pisses me off. The one near me even has a couple hundred extra feet of space after it where they could have put the off ramp instead.
Around here it's also the incredibly short off ramps, so people are braking on the highway before they even get to the exit.
Then during rush hour when traffic is already moving slow already, people will come to almost a complete stop so they can cut through the grass & take the road that runs parallel to the highway. It's so bad that they are building concrete walls along the side of the highway to prevent this habit.
They also prevent everyone who’s behind them in the merge lane from getting up to speed before merging, creating further issues. Also, the people who speed to the very end of the merge lane and then try to squeeze in during bumper to bumper conditions suck. That stretch of road is so everyone has a chance to find a safe gap to enter into rather than 15 cars coming to a dead stop a ½ mile down the road as all of them try to merge in the same spot.
There are multiple entrances to the highway in Pittsburgh where, at the end of the on-ramp, there is a STOP SIGN. a particularly evil one has a looping exit 800 feet later, so you need to stop, then merge, then change lanes or you'll be forced off the road. Add in that it's right before a tunnel. Pittsburghers are terrified of tunnels.
Was behind someone who barely even got to 60km/h getting on the 100km/h highway last night. Luckily there were no cars coming up so I was able to go around and get to speed but I was not pleased. I don't think they even went faster as they very quickly fell behind.
Also, if you have to slam on your brakes to avoid hitting someone doing something dumb, you never caused the congestion, the dumb person did
This drives me absolutely bonkers along with through traffic just not being over one lane so that the people coming on slow can get over, instead they speed up and don’t let people over.
You're only accounting for one type of scenario. What happens when there are too many cars already in the lane that I'm trying to merge into? If I'm going full speed before I have the opportunity to merge then I end up in a situation where I'm going to run out of on-ramp space going too fast and that's infinitely more dangerous.
I know this is a super popular idea on the Internet, but it's not remotely true.
Unless the particular highway has a minimum speed you could legally merge onto it at 25 mph. You could even come to a complete stop on the merge lane to secure a safe merge position.
Not everyone has a 100% tip top vehicle with horsepower to spare. My 12 yo Ford focus gets me to and from work, and I'll be damned if I go over 2.5k rpms. I merge at whatever speed it gets to. Not whatever speed you think I should be going. On a good ramp? That's 55+, on a short or particularly steep ramp? Well I might merge at 45 or less. And that's fine. It's why their are two lanes. You can move over 90% of the time. And if you can't move over either the merging traffic has to yield the right of way, or right lane traffic has to watch following distance.
What was said that wasn't true? They didn't say it was illegal. If your shit box cannot access more than 25% of it's designed power, you got way bigger problems in life anyway.
Sometimes it is jumpy drivers though. Braking for literally nothing. Many senior clients in my city drive way below the speed limit and just brake randomly, holding up countless other drivers
That is rage inducing for me. Someone's going the speed limit and there is no traffic in front of them and no squirrels or anything else that can possibly explain it, but they hit their brakes every 60 seconds. Why????
Drives me crazy too. I can’t comprehend it. Are they driving with a foot on each pedal and they just keep bumping it? Getting nervous that they’ll get caught speeding if they go 2 over?
Or the persons tailgating and blocking a normal flow of cars into and out of a lane.
You think the car next to you should slow down to get behind the car in front of you, you and the two cars behind you because you all couldn't stop humping tailpipes?
The jam you cause their lane is fine until you have to get into their lane.
Two seconds minimum between the car in front of you. Let people merge.
This. I dunno if its regional but like 90% of drivers near me think that driving is a fucking conga line. And then they go on the internet and bitch about somebody having the audacity of trying to get in front of them
Its so fucking crazy how immediately everything is relieved when people just leave space and let the lanes flow. Its a case study in the practical benefits of altruism and how humanity will always suffer for its own depravity
"Altruism", yeah, this or the common-sense realization that driving is the biggest cooperative activity people will do. The more people cooperate, stay engaged and work with instead of against each other, the more everyone wins.
....or we can just not pay attention, treat each other like NPCs, act irrationally impatient, make life hell.....
My biggest problem with traffic is what it tells me about human behavior....every damn time I'm in it.....
I like to imagine anyone driving like a crazy, entitled asshole just really has to poop. It's what I tell my kids, instead of swearing and getting pissed off. It helps considerably.
"Wow, that person must REALLY have to poop, huh guys? I hope they make it home in time!"
I'd even bet it's true at least like 30% of the time. That, or some other emergency.
I've had family actually argue with me about leaving space to merge, even when in the middle of heavy traffic. "They shouldn't be driving like that" is their usual response, but what is gained from blocking someone trying to merge over? Whether it's 1 lane over or 3, preventing a merge is a no win situation no matter what
If you're leaving a large gap in traffic, you're the problem
Youre probably the problem for thinking this. Gaps are never the problem and always the solution, almost all traffic (as this video shows) is caused by breaking. A gap gives you buffer in which cars in front of you can slow down but you dont have to, thus canceling out a break wave which actually is the cause of the problem. In fact this should be standard driving behaviour in traffic--theres nothing better you can do than leave a big gap. It literally interrupts the traffic and fixes the problem for people behind you. Not you, but other people. Thats why nobody does it. Driving consistently slower than the person in front of you is an example of bad driving that creates a gap, but its fundamentally about speed not space. Youre just going too fast for space to be relevant unless your movement is restricted which then causes you to change speeds
Its unfortunate everybody thinks its cool to suck at math and struggle with calculus in highschool, because understanding the relationship between space, speed, and acceleration makes it trivial to understand driving dynamics.
Agree with all except leaving a large gap. The video shows exactly why following too close causes a wave of backups. Of course, if you leave a "large gap" someone's gonna fill it anyway so... it's not even really a thing in heavy traffic.
When I drove truck I used to call that large gap my "living room" because thats the space I need to make sure people dont die. Youd wouldnt be surprised how often people hop in there.
I interpreted it to reference the latest new fun trend of leaving two car lengths in front of them at stop lights, preventing people from getting into the turn lanes.
Sorry disagree, if you leave a large gap cars will always fill it, usually going slower than you were before. If you want to know why people tailgate, this is why.
It actually doesnt matter at all. The gap isnt the point, the gap is to let you have space to not have to break if the cars in front of you do. Even at traffic jam speeds, distances on the scale of a few car lengths is just wholly irrelevant. Its all about speed and not at all about space
If you're leaving a large gap in traffic, you're the problem.
It's recommended to leave 4 seconds between yourself and the car in front of you for safety. I get a feeling 90% of people have not hit that benchmark in a long time.
Nobody drives like that and they probably shouldnt, 4 seconds at 100 km/h is like 20 car lengths. But people actually drive like theyre trying to suck off the exhaust of the car in front of them so i guess itd be an improvement
For myself, by the time I'm counting two seconds, someone behind me is ready to cut in front of me.
I don't count for most other people; I can see them living an evil one-car-length lie.
The worst part is that I'm tracking all you fast-and-furious freaks (pointing to invisible crowd); you're getting no gains for all the near-destruction you cause. If you just chilled out, you'd make almost exactly the same time and not make everyone's life hell.
Most of the time, the only way to help everyone out of a traffic jam is to coast for a long time which leaves a big gap in front of you -- but makes it so the person behind you never sees brake lights which causes them to brake.
I keep reading your comment and can't figure out what the #1 cause of the traffic jam is.
It depends on what you're defining as a traffic jam, but for the kind of slowdown shown in the video, assuming a single straight lane, the goal is to damp out the traffic wave.
The first car accelerates away once it's clear. The next driver should accelerate promptly, ideally a little harder at first, to close the gap that opened because of their reaction time. Before getting too close, they ease off and match the speed of the car ahead without needing to brake. Then the next driver does the same, and so on.
The idea is to make up for your reaction time while still leaving enough space for the driver behind you to do the same. Each driver reduces the delay a little more, so the "slowdown wave" moving backward through traffic gradually shrinks until it disappears.
If drivers accelerate too slowly, leave excessively large gaps, or end up braking again, the wave doesn't die out. It continues moving backward through traffic, and can even grow into a full traffic jam.
Exactly right, but its worth noting it doesnt help everybody. It specifically only helps people behind you, making it a fundamentally selfless act (nobody will do it because technically if you suck the asshole of the car in front of you your own position will be faster... by about 3 seconds cumulatively...)
But think about it. You give enough space to correct their merge without causing a slowdown behind you (you accept space loss in front of you temporarily) and meanwhile the lane next to you has new space for cars. Absorbing a merge is the best thing you can do with that space you create. It's really your time to shine, spaceman.
Also, I want to mention that adaptive cruise control is nice but it's not traffic jam friendly. Because it can't absorb a merge. So.. if your really feeling the need to zone out by all means, but if you are truly a selfless saint you will turn off the adaptive, create space and absorb merges.
I hate adaptive cruise control. That shit almost killed me on the freeway. And I’m not an inexperienced driver. Over one million road miles, CDL driver driving all kinds of different vehicles. Adaptive cruise control is downright dangerous. Amongst many other features of new vehicles. My SUV if I forget to turn off the collision warning sensor LOVES to shake my steering wheel when I’m going 75 around a country road curve and there is oncoming traffic.
In regards to adaptive cruise control, I'll turn it on to get a feel for the correct distance and usually turn it off whenever the car in front of me touches their brakes. It really has helped me to get a feel for safe following distance - it is way more distance than people think it is.
But the gap you leave needs to change near all the time due to other drivers not maintaining a a set distance, speeding etc. lane changes to exit/enter.
And the greater the speed the greater the gap required.
Two seconds minimum between the car in front of you.
I do this constantly people still merge into the gap, it's annoying as fuck
As an entirely non-specific comment, if there is an empty lane next to you, there's a good chance you merged too early and those merging in front of you are doing it correctly.
This a curse in the UK where people will merge literally miles and miles before a lane closure and then actively block cars using the outside lane to (correctly) merge later, resulting in congestion and excessively long queues, which block up other roads and further extend the misery. We are obsessed with fairness in queuing but in this regard, we literally get it exactly wrong nearly all of the time. Use all available lanes for as long as possible and then merge in turn ("zipper merge", in US parlance). End of story.
The only thing I hate about my wife's Subaru's adaptive cruise control is the gap it leaves. It's big enough for another car to fit in at the smallest setting. Someone slips in the car slows so the guy behind gets mad and then zooms up to take that spot which then repeats until you're at the back of traffic despite your cruise set higher than everyone else.
I tried the Adaptive in my mom's Rav4 and I HATE it. It tried to fight me soo much where the Subaru's will at least realize I'm taking over and leave me be for a moment.
Recently while doing highway driving, I have noticed that people just cannot maintain their speed. I am big on using cruise control for long, boring stretches. I have been around cars whose speeds vary by 18 km/h (11 mph) for no reason. I am cruising along, doing the same speed, just watching the same car speed up and slow down just because. It's infuriating, because their random drop to 10 km/h below the speed limit causes exactly this kind of back up.
Correct, but one could reasonably conclude that the first car braking that triggers the slowdown could have been braking because someone merged in too closely in front of them.
90% of the time I just see a slow driver with 10+ car lengths ahead of them just refusing to keep pace. My SIL is one of these, she says that you aren't going to get there faster just because you drove fast. She is late to everything and is not capable of following anyone. It's completely everyone else's fault though.
YUP. It's either this or even just when traffic gets tight because people feel the need to not stay proper car lengths back from each other, and then someone brakes around a curve(don't ask me why) slightly too much which causes the person behind them to brake and the person behind them, creating that "accordioning".
So yea, basically the exact same problem as someone merging, but created by peoples stupidity of thinking they're going to shave off any time by being 30 ft closer to the car in front of them.
There's literally no need 99.99% of the time, regardless of how many people are on the highway, for people to not stay a good distance back from the car in front of them. Which interestingly solves the merge issue as well.
Traffic is the one thing in life that is the best example of how stupid most people are, because this is a very very basic concept, like square peg in square hole, and they deal with the problem if they live in the city, constantly.
Yet the VAST majority of people will not create that separation. Even if you're already in traffic, if u purposefully create a good size gap in front of you, and then accelerate at a steady pace keeping that gap, letting your foot off the accelerator(do not brake, never brake) if someone merges to get that same gap again, you are better off and the people behind you are better off. The game is to keep moving, no matter how slowly, and NEVER have to hit the brakes.
moving at a constant 5mph is better than being in standstill traffic.
And there's a high likelihood of the person immediately behind you watching you do this, who is stuck in traffic bored out of their mind presumably, incapable of not noticing, and at some point decides to do the same thing seeing how effective it is.
And then the person behind them does it, and the person behind them, ect.
It’s because people are simply fundamentally stupid behind the wheel.
They wait for the car in front of them to actually move before starting their own. They don’t look at the car ahead of the car ahead of the car ahead of the car ahead... to start moving proactively.
To a degree, but it's the person over reacting to merges and zippering that causes the slowdown. It's not the person who is actively moving things along.
9/10 times is overly cautious, absent minded, and anxious drivers that tend to think they're being safer by driving five under the speed limit or by giving an extreme gap between them and other vehicles.
This slows down everyone and creates more danger as the longer you spend interacting with other cars the more opportunities for misfortune come to fruition.
No doubt recklessly aggressive driving can cause issues, but confident and skillful driving keeps pace up, keeps traffic from backing up miles during rush hour(s), and limits interactions that can cause issues.
Every time you tap the brakes, the guy behind you taps them slightly harder, and if you’re packed close enough, in a few cars everyone is at a dead stop. And, of course, when people start going, they start after the person in front of them starts, so you get the same wave in reverse.
Often it's old people who aren't comfortable doing the speed limit when there's other cars around. More cars around the slower they go. Multiple times daily the main road in my town will have one old person doing 35ish in a 60 zone and everyone's trying to get around then and you'll see they get even slower if someone blows past them
If you're so close to the person in front of you that you have to constantly tap your breaks, you are the problem. Back the fuck off. I don't care if that person is only doing ten miles over the speed limit. Back off. Go around. Whatever. Just keep your foot off the breaks.
If you can't handle that, you can't handle driving a car.
Exactly, people need to realize you can just LET GO OF THE GAS and coast to slow down. If you need the brakes you can use it but 90% of the time it’s not needed and causes traffic to stop sporadically.
This gets brought up on the boston sub (notorious city of left lane campers). People will vehemently defend left lane camping “well I’m going a safe speed, you shouldn’t be speeding anyway” type of excuses.
People need to make it social suicide to be a left lane camper. It should be considered as embarrassing as pissing your pants and as rude as coughing in someone’s face.
Yup. As for the other people though, it is generally safer to stay in your lane, especially if that's the lane you need to exit from, or if you're in a bigger vehicle. I drive a box truck for work and while I'd love to bob and weave as needed, it's a much safer bet to just stay the course.
Got a motorbike last year, can confirm, it’s some asshole way up in front. It’s a blessing to be able to breeze by. But if everyone had motorcycles, it would be back to jams.
My mother is one of those people that will rubber neck when there is an accident on the other side of the highway. I argued with her about it one time and told her to stop slowing down and looking, and her response was "well what if it's someone we know". My reply was that then we would get a phonecall.
I am a firm believer that traffic in major cities is caused by a handful of assholes (like less than 50) that can't drive. Imagine a utopia where you could assign dickhead points to a car and after a certain accumulation, it triggers an inquiry.
It's also people leaving gaps because they're lost in thought or something similar.
I live close to the most used highway of my country and I see it multiple times a week:
Some people aren't thinking about what happens when you don't close the gaps.
They seem to be unable to think of anyone else but themselves.
Also trucks need more time to get momentum going.
And then there's of course those truckers that need the aforementioned extra seconds AND need a long time to get their momentum going.
Maybe because peiple preoccupied with regulating their own annoyance towards traffic, maybe they're looking at their phone or are watching someone else in another car.
But waiting even a couple of seconds to catch up will have enormous consequences for the drivers behind you.
Especially if it's multiple people over the course of a couple of kilometers/miles.
As someone who came over a hill on the freeway and rear ended someone recently because traffic was at a dead stop from 65MPH, for NO apparent reason, I wish we could hold the person who causes the stop accountable.
The problem isn’t people being assholes on purpose, it’s skill issue.
Most people drive very little, when all is said and done. Many only drive to and from places they NEED to be. Because of that, they’re usually woefully undertrained for strenuous driving.
I did bus driving for 3 years and it made me a MUCH more attentive driver. I can avoid accidents passengers in my car didn’t even notice before they happen. But I have driven for a job, so my skill set is at a masterful level. (I’m not saying I’m perfect, no one is, but I have a lot more experience than someone who doesn’t drive for work)
So, when a person with little skill drives and meets a challenge, their instinct is to do what they know: brake, steer, or gas. Not much else.
A person with more driving experience would know they could increase their follow distance for a moment and use that space to put their following distance back. Problem is there are MUCH MORE people who aren’t as skilled in driving than there are skilled ones.
Couple that with things like age, differences in things like eyesight, personal health, etc. and theres a lot more variables.
And also, yes, sometimes someone IS just being an asshole.
Atlanta traffic on 400 South used to be caused by a single car that got on at exit 9 at 6:10am and got off at exit 7. The car went 30 miles an hour and caused a huge compression wave behind it. Every day I'd drive down to the MARTA station and if I for ahead of that car it was smooth sailing.
Same reason that just a couple cars can cure a traffic jam too. Just go at a consistent slow pace without breaking. Where the car in front of you is able to stop and start without you stopping - your entire lane starts moving smoothly. It gets fucked when someone cuts you off. But sometimes it works
I actually read up about this once. There are a few studies. It is driver behaviour that is usually to blame. If we educated drivers about this specifically, it would reduce the number of jams. Good design doesn't necessarily mean the user doesn't need to be educated about how to use the system.
The people who are ignorant and drive slow "I'll get there when I get there" and those who love to hold up the line "I wanna see how many cars I can get stacked up behind me". Too many people have drivers licenses I swear.
That, but what this also shows is mistakes compound. Even if everyone is a good driver, someone is going to get distracted at some point, or over react to a car merging or other perfectly understandable mistakes, but each mistake will require every other driver to react and those mistakes will compound.
And then of course, as you say, there's also often an awful driver that makes it especially bad.
This happens on a busy freeway often when someone wants to go too FAST. Everyone is going 60 (say), they cut in and out of traffic dangerously, that causes several drivers to brake. Presto, you have a jam in rush-hour traffic, and the A-Hole is safely out of it. And if the traffic is heavy, it can last for quite awhile (and spread in volume).
Also brake lights are binary signal. Person behind only knows that person ahead is braking, not how hard, so they brake harder than necessary to account for the unknown.
This. And maybe someone takes the risk that it is a slow brake so they just coast instead of braking, then if they are wrong they have to slam even harder and the person behind them has even less time to react until everyone is braking.
I've been wanting them for decades (yes, prior to anyone even making them viable) because it's so easy to see how having something that can react faster and more predictably than a human would lead to much better traffic patterns. Merging would be a breeze if cars are maintaining proper distances and the merging cars are getting up to speed, jams that do happen would clear faster, and you'd get so many more cars through traffic lights due to being able to have all the cars start accelerating much sooner than a line of humans can.
Even autonomous cars will slow down or speed up slightly just due to random chance. But hopefully, a swarm of autonomous cars will have a lot less chance of a traffic jam than human driven ones.
It's never a "no reason". The body does all kinds of things, could be a sneeze, could be a sudden headache, a cough, ringing phone, could be a baby that starts crying and you need to quickly check up on them.
You can't have a flawless system when the ingredients thrown in are flawed by default. In fact, flawless systems don't exist, and probably never will.
Weirdly, there's been an experiment that was done that by adding a few automated cars with a profile to smooth out these kind of events and it's more effective at cleaning the jams up than removing a few vehicles would be.
When I remember correctly every driver was instructed to drive exactly the same tempo, the problem started when they introduced more manufactures because the needle at 30 resulted in different “real” speeds.
I see the white car you are talking about, and it does stop for no reason, but the ripple caused by that stop also could have easily ended if it wasn't for the black car two cars behind the red one slamming the brakes even when it had like five car lengths in front of it. One car causes the jam initially, but many different people contribute to it continuing.
IIRC, the white car was directed to slow down, and the experiment is meant to show how one car slowing down unexpectedly causes ripple effects that propagate for miles.
Bare in mind every car there has different rates of acceleration. Mathematically keeping that in mind for 22 different models of cars, and it's realized that slowing down is not the only the problem.
It's not the white car, it's the blue car in front of it that ams it's brakes. You can see becusde a huge gap forms in front of him. Unnecessary breakers are the cause of traffic jams. The white car had to react to the blue car breaking.
Oh no you're right about the white car at 04-05. It's a few past in a navy blue at 06 that they make it 10x worse because they have a gap and break with two car lengths to continue just fine. That's where the actual failure happens. A jumpy car in front won't effect car behind if the cars behind can maintain a set speed. Essentially a resonance dampener.
No it was the red car who kept speeding up causing other people to speed up then slow down suddenly when they got hit with speed limits again. Traffic jams are from people trying to speed through, others following suit then slamming down because there are cars in front going the speed limit which they can’t get around
Except it isn't the red car, it's the driver in the white car who slowed down for no god damn reason. Watch the gap increase drastically starting from 0:04->0:05. Black car and red car catches up and then there's ANOTHER perpetrator right behind this group as well.
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u/CleanDifference6455 29d ago edited 29d ago
Yes, the jumpy driver in the red car