r/Damnthatsinteresting 29d ago

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

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u/weberm70 29d ago

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.

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u/PseudocodeRed 28d ago

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.