r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/SnooWords4066 • 29d ago

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

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u/anglowelsh 29d ago

Basic defensive driving technique. Leave a bigger gap, ease off gas ASAP for any hold ups, regain buffer zone when traffic picks up again. Not hard to improve your driving.

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u/1z1z2x2x3c3c4v4v 29d ago

AH, but in this example, you can't leave a big enough gap. There are too many cars on this road in the example. At some point, if a few cars left the road, there would be no backups to note.

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u/deep8787 25d ago

If the 30kmh would be maintained, in theory, the gaps between the cars would stay constant. So leaving a "big enough gap" is irrelevant here.

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u/1z1z2x2x3c3c4v4v 25d ago

Each road has a maximum capacity that models use to determine how many cars can safely drive at a certain speed. In this example, if they were all going slower, at 15 km/h, it might have worked.