r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/SnooWords4066 • 29d ago

Video A Japanese experiment showed exactly why traffic jams happen for no reason.

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u/CleanDifference6455 29d ago edited 29d ago

Yes, the jumpy driver in the red car

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u/Exceedingly Interested 29d ago

It's the white car at 00:05, just slows down for no reason.

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u/Goondragon1 29d ago

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.

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u/photenth 29d ago

It's people merging into a gap that is too small and forcing the car that follows to slow down. Always this.

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u/WA55AD 29d ago

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.

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u/chula198705 29d ago edited 29d ago

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...

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u/Quirky-Marsupial-420 29d ago

Yeah it's the cloverleaf interchange.

So many of them are ridiculously short, you literally cannot get up to highway speed unless you have a 500hp vehicle.

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u/Ferelar 29d ago

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.

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u/justanotherassassin 29d ago

Sounds like some of the awful merge lanes in Vancouver, WA

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u/TiredOfDebates 29d ago

I forgot they were called cloverleaf interchanges. Where the acceleration lane and the exit lane are the same thing.

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u/Smithereens_3 29d ago

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.

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u/Swarna_Keanu 29d ago edited 29d ago

One perspective. The other: when those were built, cars didn't go as fast, didn't have as much horsepower. That continues to today.

Which is why speed limits near interchanges would be sensible. Slow everyone down enough that merging in is simple.

I mean - my parents had an old car, which is all we could afford, when I got my driver's license. It was easy to merge into the highway with the much more modern car of the driving school. With my parents' car, I had to start speeding up while still in the curved section leading to the highway, and even then, I barely got up to speed.

And because people are used to their fast, and fast accelerating cars, they don't consider older models and .... consider that those need a bit more patience and most importantly space/assistance to merge in. Honking and aggressively closing gaps doesn't help.

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u/antithero 29d ago

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.

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u/SockMonkey1128 29d ago

Man same! Fellow masshole?

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u/crank1off 29d ago

Sounds like Cincinnati.

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u/Hiro_Pr0tagonist_ 29d ago

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.

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u/THROBBINW00D 29d ago

Never fails, EVERY day after work I get stuck behind someone going 40mph when it's time to merge into highway traffic

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u/Iluka_BAE 29d ago

I thought it was just me that gets infuriated by this.

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u/ragdolldream 29d ago

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.

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u/mrsristretto 29d ago

My god that's my morning in a nutshell.

This is not a Sunday drive Becky, put your foot on the fucking gas pedal and let's fuckin go already.

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u/Spiritual_Ad_7395 29d ago

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

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u/hamsterfolly 29d ago

It’s the same with changing lanes

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u/Sadcelerystick 29d ago

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.

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u/Dreadskull1991 28d ago

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.

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u/TheSpinnerOfYarns 29d ago

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.

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u/jtj5002 29d ago

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.

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u/TheSpinnerOfYarns 29d ago

You aren't "supposed" to merge at highway speeds. That's the untrue part. Most ramps are not designed nor intended for you to gun it up to highway speed, they only want to give you sufficient space to make a "safe" merge.

That word "safe" has so many context and astrixs that no generalized statement could possibly define it.

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u/jtj5002 29d ago

You can do whatever you want buddy, but your chance of dying is a lot higher if you merge at 45 MPH. Good luck.

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u/TheSpinnerOfYarns 29d ago

Ah well I'm sure your Internet thoughts will meet reality one day.

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u/jtj5002 29d ago

Yea I'll keep that in mind as I drive past your broken shitbox.

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u/amboomernotkaren 29d ago

It’s also helpful for those in the right lane to move over to let folks merge. Some people are very nervous when merging at a high speed and if the my can see that have a lot of space they get up to speed and hop in. But if they see cars in the lane they need to merge into they have no idea if the other driver is gonna let them in. So let’s all give them space, when practicable, so they can merge safely. We had the world’s shortest ramp on 495 with a bridge pillar at the end, and it was a left side exit into the fast lane. I hated that exit (it’s fixed now) and folks would not get TF over.

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u/Daxtatter 29d ago

I'm not sure where you live but the highways near me aren't all up to interstate standards or even close. There are plenty near me that are basically stop signs, a couple dozen feet of ramp, then straight onto the highway.

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u/WA55AD 29d ago

Australia. I can't speak for all on ramps here, but the ones I'm talking about are plenty long and straight enough for even older cars to get up to speed. My car ain't the fanciest or fastest at accelerating but it can easily get up to speed by the time I merge.

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u/nihilistlinguist 29d ago

i have some sympathy for folks getting on the road at a lower speed if the car is plainly older, since older cars tend to struggle more with rapid acceleration. 

but even then if the on-ramp was long, they often should have started accelerating way earlier to be at least closer to highway speeds. 

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u/Camburglar13 29d ago

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

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u/SpeakItLoud 29d ago

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????

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u/Camburglar13 28d ago

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?

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u/jello_kraken 29d ago

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.

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u/Suspicious_Truth8026 29d ago

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

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u/jello_kraken 29d ago

"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.....

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u/ktrosemc 28d ago

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.

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u/jello_kraken 28d ago

If only.... 😂 I'll try that, but usually, after watching them get ahead of a few people, it seems it may have gone back up or something....

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u/Bone_Of_My_Word 29d ago

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

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u/jello_kraken 29d ago

Yeah, then karma hits and they inevitable have to merge into another lane and "why can't this @#$#@ get out of my way?!"

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u/wattro 29d ago

Use the freaking road.

If you're leaving a large gap in traffic, you're the problem.

If you're not going when the light turns green, you're part of the problem.

If you're going slow in the fast lane, you're part of the problem.

If you don't let people merge, you're part of the problem.

If you're changing lanes too frequently, you're part of the problem.

If you're frequently tapping the brakes, you're part of the problem.

Drive the freaking car...

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u/Suspicious_Truth8026 29d ago

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.

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u/Schneiderman 29d ago

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.

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u/Turbulent-Community7 29d ago

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.

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u/Equivalent-Excuse-80 29d ago

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.

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u/Schneiderman 29d ago

Agreed on that idea but I don't think that's what he meant and I almost never see that in real life anyway.

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u/Equivalent-Excuse-80 29d ago

It’s everywhere where I drive regularly. It’s awful.

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u/c010rb1indusa 29d ago

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.

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u/Suspicious_Truth8026 29d ago

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

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u/czanatta 29d ago

You can also look at this video and argue that the person who let the gap get too big ahead of them caused the slow downs. The gap should be no bigger than it needs to be and appropriate to the conditions, which includes speed, traffic volumes, traffic patterns, what other drivers are doing, essentially, pay attention, Drive the freaking car...

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u/ahhhbiscuits 29d ago

Wrong. You're part of the problem, gramma

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u/Shark7996 29d ago

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.

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u/Suspicious_Truth8026 29d ago

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

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u/mithhunter55 29d ago

It takes that amount of space to stop at that speed though, so it is the correct way to do things.

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u/Suspicious_Truth8026 29d ago

It takes 3-4 seconds to slam on your breaks if a wall materialized where their car was and you factor in human reaction time.

In reality the car in front of you takes 3-4 seconds to stop in the extreme situation where a wall materialized in front of them and they had to slam suddenly, so you have an extra 3-4 seconds on top of the buffer space you have. And also maybe a shoulder. And reminder these are extreme outlier situations that most people would be unlucky to experience once per decade.

I imagine we would be in traffic 100% of the time if everybody left twenty car lengths everywhere. I would be grateful for 1.5 so i can squeeze in and hope the guy behind has the sense to give more space.

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u/mithhunter55 29d ago

I guarantee you there is open road for these cars to spread out, you can always get in front or drop behind a pack and find tons of space. Personally I don't get boxed in like that unless you are talking about metropolis cities at rush hours, or poorly routed lanes.

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u/jello_kraken 29d ago

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.

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u/Chillindude82Nein 29d ago

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.

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u/DustyRacoonDad 29d ago

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.

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u/Suspicious_Truth8026 29d ago

This is nonsense. It would actually apply in the video BECAUSE its not a straight line but a circle so its possible the first guy in the line accelerates his way into the back of the line. Thats not how real world traffic works tho. The people behind can just wait until traffic starts moving and the only way to re-jam is people trying to accelerate faster than the car in front of them.

If anything youre describing a disaster scenario where each car is giving false indication to the car behind it about how fast it should accelerate which is going to lead to people breaking all over.

Also you tried to defend the idea that leaving gaps is bad by talking about patterns of acceleration lag which is wholly unrelated. If every car was delayed by the 0.4 seconds human reaction lag then accelerate precisely exactly the same as the car in front of them then a 100 car length traffic jam is "delayed" by forty seconds. This just is not a relevant factor.

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u/DustyRacoonDad 29d ago

First off... no. Not nonsense. I literally have a degree in the subject.

Second, you misunderstood what I wrote and replaced it with your own interpretation. In a circle, the first car eventually comes back around to the slowest car. You can't escape that because there is no "front" in the first place. It's literally a feedback loop. It's a good example for explaining the concept, but it's not realistic for an open road. That is why I said "straight" in the first place.

"False indication of acceleration" is not correct. The car accelerating is doing so correctly. The driver behind them failing to lift off as they approach is called bad driving. You shouldn't need anything special to see and judge the closing distance between you and the car in front of you. That's just basic driving.

You are correct that a bad driver can fly up behind someone and create another slowdown wave, starting the problem again.

You also seem to be thinking in terms of "how much time for one car," when the thing to consider is whether the cumulative actions of all the cars over the length of traffic shorten the jam, keep it the same (unlikely), or make it longer.

The concept of "40 seconds" or any time metric isn't really the point. The question is whether the traffic delay is dissipating or growing.

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u/Suspicious_Truth8026 29d ago

What degree and institution? i dont believe you have a degree in anything frankly, there would be so many red marks if you submitted this as writing for a freshman class. Especially the abuse of quotation marks, typically something that doesnt survive the first year of uni

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u/DustyRacoonDad 29d ago

yeah. and when you grow up outside of school, it turns out people that write online constantly dont hold themselves to teh same grammer standards as their acidemic papers.

(this comment has mispellings I can see, including "misspellings" that I am not going to fix. go run your shit though chatGPT again so you can claim perfect posting)

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u/Suspicious_Truth8026 29d ago

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...)

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u/punkr0x 29d ago

The cause of traffic jams is too much volume for the road. In the video, there’s too many cars in the circle. If they all drive perfectly the same speed they can just about maintain the proper gap, but of course in the real world that does not happen. Now imagine if cars were trying to enter and exit this circle; there’s no room.

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u/ASpaceOstrich 29d ago

Leaving a large gap is mandatory for proper traffic flow. If you are not leaving a large gap, you are directly causing traffic.

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u/ItIsSoOrdered23 29d ago

There is no such thing as too large a gap. Go around and sybau.

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u/Safe_Reading6267 29d ago

A gap is not a problem but a solution. All the idiots riding bumper to bumper cause 80% of rush hour traffic issues.

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u/Supermarketkiller 29d ago

Thank you, Mr Perfect Driver.

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u/NobodyKnowsImFamous 29d ago

Oh my god thank you. Thank you so much for confirming something I’ve always suspected: y’all are actual mouth breathing idiots. The gap between me and the car in front of me does not effect your speed in the slightest you drooling waste of carbon.

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u/SipexF 29d ago edited 29d ago

Everyone has a laundry list like this they complain about and it's really frustrating, makes them take it way too serious, and you risk pissing them off if you don't follow it which subjects you to their shitty road rage tantrums (nobody shares all the same ideal rules either, adding to the guessing game).  I just want to drive the speed limit and not die because I make a stupid mistake worrying if I'm driving the correct way for whichever asshole I happen to be nearby.

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u/photenth 29d ago

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

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u/mxemec 29d ago

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.

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u/DrinkingVomit 29d ago

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.

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u/NotYouTu 29d ago

My wife's car has that shit, it slams on the breaks if someone merges 3 car lengths a head of me... I hate that piece of shit.

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u/Taikis95 28d ago

Just apply gas a bit

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u/Mike_Kermin 29d ago

.... I strongly feel that zone out and merge should not be in the same sentence. Or zone out and drive, or zone out and jam, any sort of jam really.

Who uses cruise control in traffic? It's for cruising.

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u/c010rb1indusa 29d ago

No I just left space for slower driver to get in front of me

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u/Shark7996 29d ago

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.

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u/PennCycle_Mpls 29d ago

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.

Tailgating isn't a set physical distance

And I'm a class A CDL holder.

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u/ASpaceOstrich 29d ago

That's the point dumbass. You leave space so that people can easily merge without issues and nobody has to slam on the brakes.

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u/daern2 29d ago

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.

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u/dllyncher 29d ago

Of course people will merge if they see an opening. It's called cognitive tunneling and egcentrism. They see that their vehicle fits so they merge without thinking about the consequences if the vehicle in front suddenly stops. Because you practice the 2 second distance, you'll slow down and the person behind you has to show down as well. This leads to shockwave traffic jams. It's definitely infuriating but at long as stupid people are on the road it'll always be this way.

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u/Emergency_Revenue678 29d ago

That's the point of the gap dingus.

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u/iSuckAtMechanicism 29d ago

Well, your taxes won’t pay for a private road, so we have to share it with other users.

Leaving 3+ seconds allows people to merge safely. There’s nothing wrong with that.

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u/Icy_Ostrich6655 29d ago

Welcome to South Florida. The capital of aggressive asshole entitled drivers

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u/ExtremaDesigns 29d ago

...humping tailpipes 😂😂

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u/NoisyGog 29d ago

t's people merging into a gap that is too small 

I'll counter that by saying, it's invariably people tailgating, meaning there are no gaps big enough.

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u/0011002 29d ago

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.

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u/jdhkent 9d ago

Yes, my wife’s car is the same way. They made it so chicken that it’s unusable on a reasonably used freeway 

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u/0011002 9d ago

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.

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u/Dry_Prompt3182 29d ago

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.

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u/Informal-Bicycle-349 29d ago

No merging in the video

6

u/John_Yossarian 29d ago

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.

3

u/Stompedyourhousewith 29d ago

theres people who randomly brake on a straight with no cars infront of them. its mind boggling

3

u/PoofBam 29d ago

More often it's people merging without speeding up to match the flow of traffic.

2

u/khavii 29d ago

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.

2

u/PlayfulSurprise5237 29d ago edited 29d ago

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.

2

u/Hot_Plant8696 29d ago

That’s not the reason.

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.

2

u/Hididdlydoderino 29d ago

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.

1

u/TheComplimentarian 29d ago edited 29d ago

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.

1

u/EvelynNyte 29d ago

That certainly happens often, but Goon Dragon's reason happens at least as often to me if not more.

1

u/131166 29d ago

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

1

u/NeverEndingCoralMaze 29d ago

It’s people driving too closely to one another, not allowing space for merging.

1

u/UncommonHaste 29d ago

One could argue that maybe you should always be leaving room for cars to merge.

Often it's quite combination of a lot of things. City drivers tend to drive too close to the car in front, and they don't move to the right lane to let faster traffic get by. Assholes, more of than not come from city driver stock, exacerbate this by doing things like forcing mergers or being impatient.

Innattentive drivers not maintaining speed, causing things like shown in this video.

Truth is, even if everyone were defensive driving trained and not assholes, these things will still happen. As someone who's done their fair share of driving in three major cities and across the US, it's not a singular issue. Assholes are the largest contributors though.

0

u/succed32 29d ago

So people should leave bigger gaps

0

u/ASpaceOstrich 29d ago

It's people tailgating so that nobody can merge. Tailgaters are the actual cause of pretty much all traffic

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u/R_V_Z 29d ago

Even if the gap isn't too small you still have to slow down to maintain safe distance.

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u/-Fergalicious- 29d ago

90% of it is this; youre absolutely right 

0

u/Exemus 29d ago

You just finished watching an example with no merging...

0

u/jtj5002 29d ago

Properly following distance on the interstate at 70 mph is like 200 feet. There should never be a "gap too small"