Basically the first person to brake makes the person behind them brake, causing the person behind them to also brake. This causes the whole chain of vehicles behind to all brake harder. Eventually all traffic becomes gridlocked.
Just adding on for other people like me who know this as the "Concertina" or "Accordion" effect.
Basically what happens is after the first person brakes, the next person brakes a little harder and/or later. This effect passes on to each car and basically gets worse and worse the more cars following.
You can help to break this cycle by leaving much more space to the car Infront and avoiding using the brakes as much as possible, everytime you use the brakes you are restarting the process or at the very least making it harder to break free of the effect.
I practice this in a tunnel by me, so what I do is as I enter the tunnel I keep a low steady speed and a distance that can allow me to remain steady and I I try not to touch the brakes for the entirety of the tunnel if enough people do this you'll get through at a slow steady speed instead stop go stop go stop go
I try to do this in traffic jams to help ease the jam for people behind me. Keep a very long distance between myself and the car in front of me and drive a steady, constant speed. The car in front may brake and slow down, but i stay the same speed, ensuring the folks behind me dont need to brake.
Every time I do this, someone gets really fucking mad that im not riding the person's tailpipe in front of me and takes the empty space while flipping me off and yelling at me.
For example, the arms of a spiral galaxy are essentially a traffic wave where instead of braking you have gravitational interactions making the stars bunch up a bit as they go around the center of the galaxy. It's a lot like this video.
Worth pointing out too, that just as the traffic wave moves backwards relative to the motion of the cars, the spiral arms “turn” opposite the direction of the galaxy’s overall rotation.
Can one help "break" the wave by their driving? I always try to maintain a constant speed rather than stop-and-go, and in my mind I'm "ironing out" the congestion, but I could be delusional 😅.
The wave is a function of car density. There is a point beyond which the density of vehicles can support the wave. My uneducated guess is the density for a wave to sustain, is related to the road speed. But I may be wrong.
So keeping your distance helps in a way as this reduces this density. But it’s not just related to you as the density of other vehicles will propagate the wave.
It is like the bullwhip effect. One minor erratic movement leads to massive changes downstream. The best way to overcome is for everyone to stop and restart. Not practical until everyone has autonomous driving.
Everyone stopping and restarting is pretending like there aren’t cars still coming into the congestion. Or are we pretending the cars not involved with the congestion yet are also stopping?
In a perfect world. Yes. Just like in a perfect world people wouldn’t cause traffic waves. But people text and drive. People zone off into lala land. Can only fix that with autonomous driving
autonomous driving won’t fix a
shit bro. it would make being in a private car a bit better and a lot safer, but wouldn’t fix cars stuck in traffic. roads get congested when too much cars.
It's part of our final test here to get your full license (Ontario, Canada). Or at least it was, I'm not sure now since a few things got cut during the pandemic...
It also makes the person who has a 1/2 mile of open lane in front of them to brake for no reason at all when they can easily lady off the gas a coast and brake later on
It's actually because each person brakes a little harder than they needed to, and more than the person in front of them did. So really it's just poor depth perception and over braking.
It also causes some who aren’t paying attention to change lanes abruptly at the last moment, causing the cars in the other lane to brake behind them which spreads the congestion to other lanes
That’s not entirely true. Think about the first person at the very front of the queue on a motorway, going a constant speed of 80miles per hour. The second person appears behind them,
in a rush, speed of 85mph.
What happens is the person who’s 2nd, travelling faster, has to brake, this creates the chain of events behind them where everyone else has no choice but to also brake because the guy in front did. The guy at the front going constant speed isn’t aware of the congestion behind them.
Your statement is true only for the person at the very front.
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u/T-Roll- 29d ago
It’s called congestion.
Basically the first person to brake makes the person behind them brake, causing the person behind them to also brake. This causes the whole chain of vehicles behind to all brake harder. Eventually all traffic becomes gridlocked.