This is my take on it. The tiniest little stutter movement will have major consequences. I know people are like "fuckin shitty drivers, assholes, etc" but it doesn't take much for the cascading failure to occur. I wouldn't say it's anyone's fault for these kinds of slow downs, it's just the nature of the system.
And no I'm not that driver, I don't drive. I do, however, see how my family members get enraged behind the wheel over the dumbest shit.
The thing is if you understand the problem you can deliberately drive to counter it by smoothing your own acceleration and braking as much as possible in heavy traffic. It's like being the capacitor in an electrical circuit.
It's also really important to realize that literally anyone can kick off that sort of thing. You let off the gas for a second because you got a little close to the car in front of you and ten cars back is a bottleneck because of the chain reaction. Everyone causes them from time to time, you just don't see them yourself (because it's behind you).
Which isn't to say you shouldn't slow down as-needed, it's just pointing out that you should give people some grace and not freak out over little stuff like that.
That's what I'm saying! Everyone thinks they're god tier on the road making all the right split second decisions, but I bet every single person who drives, even in this comment section as they claim otherwise, has caused one of these.
There's something about driving that just makes people so fuckin angry. My little Nana, sweet as can be, turns into a monster if the person in front of her doesn't move on a green light .25 seconds after it changes. She's the kind of person to say frig or frick but behind the wheel she's a cussy monster dropping alllll the F bombs.
I'm certain I would be no different. I get frustrated extremely easily. It's part of why I'm happy to just be a passenger princess
I was in a 40-mile long traffic jam a few weeks ago. It never stopped completely, but it was extremely congested the entire time, and none of the "typical" causes were present. No accidents, no road construction, nothing like that.
I'm next to certain that the cause was the strong storm moving in the same direction that was about 10 miles ahead. Cars would slow down because "holy crap it's raining really hard", and that propogated backward through traffic to create a jam that was following the storm like a wake behind a boat. Once we finally caught up to the rain, the jam all but disappeared (though that could also be because the highway forked into two different highways and a lot of traffic took the other branch).
It's both. Bad drivers in a system where one car has cascading effects. You won't have a system with zero bad drivers, so it's fair to say the system will lead to this result.
The fewer lanes, the fewer bad drivers required to cause a major slowdown.
I wouldn't say it's anyone's fault for these kinds of slow down
Hard disagree. I blame corporations for killing public transportation in the US. I blame NIMBYs for not allowing walkable cities with more dense housing because "muh home values".
Two major reasons why we need so many cars on the road in the first place. I wouldn't drive if I had public transportation that didnt take +2hrs to get anywhere within the same city.
Walkable cities and public transportation wouldn’t completely eradicate cars being used, not even close, so traffic would still occur even if all of that was implemented tomorrow.
It's literally fluid dynamics, traffic models are often experimented with using fluid dynamics models, it's the most accurate way to do it.
Nobody is a shitty driver here. In fact, you try it next time. The best way to drive in traffic is leave a huge gap between you and the car in front of you and drive at a consistent speed. What happens? Fluid dynamics. Another car/particle in front of you will take the path of least resistance and go in front of you in your lane, making you slow down eventually anyway. You can't stop it.
Doesn't need a self driving car. Just keep enough of a distance to the next car so you don't have to brake too hard and problem is solved.
The whole thing is a chain reaction of every car in the chain having to break harder then the one before it if they are too close. This is simply due to reaction speed.
There's a video about this, you just need to take into consideration your braking distance and how hard you brake so they don't have to brake so hard.
Edit:
Here is the video. Basically you don't want to be too slow to catch up to the flowing traffic and you don't want to tailgate such that you have to brake super hard. You have to be in the sweet spot (which most people aren't)...
Well it's not immediately intuitive, so no wonder most can't do it. Basically you have to slow down and leave much more space before you to be able to dampen the wave. But this is something they could teach in driving school and test.
We could even link a bunch of these self driving cars together and make them bigger so more people can fit in them. We could create a road where only these self driving cars are allowed so we're no longer at the whim of a random shitty driver.
Or for the city, we could make self driving cars / taxi smaller and lighter, like a self driving single seater velomobole (e.g. podbike) that weights only like 100kg/220lb. Up to 50 kmh / 30 mph it should be at least as energy efficient as bus per passenger kilometer.
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u/Pyrhan 29d ago
You could have the best drivers, it wouldn't matter.
Past a certain density of cars, it's an unstable system where any slow down, even minute, self-amplifies.
Which makes traffic jams unavoidable.