Unlocking the mysteries of the random traffic jam
Posted by freedomforall 9 years, 5 months ago to Technology
Have you ever seen a 2-mile long traffic jam on the opposite side of the highway and thought, “Gee, I didn’t see an accident back there, I wonder what happened?”
Or maybe you are cruising along at 60 mph and suddenly you slow to a stop. You then sit stationary for 30 seconds and just as quickly you are back to cruising at 60. What happened?
Or maybe you are cruising along at 60 mph and suddenly you slow to a stop. You then sit stationary for 30 seconds and just as quickly you are back to cruising at 60. What happened?
Or go to L.A. People will sit and wait in a left turn lane, green arrow going, no one coming... then when it turns yellow, 5 or 6 cars blow through the left lane. I have asked people, and no one seems to know what's that one about... but everyone does it. (I typically "run" green lights down there, sure enough, the car behind me faithfully stops and waits for a yellow...)
I don't miss driving in commute traffic - not at all!
We get our own, tho. Speed limit is 55. You come up behind someone doing 60 (and you're doing 65 or so) and they slow w-a-a-a-y down to about 40-45, as long as there's a double yellow line. Once the passing lane comes up, they're back up to 70+... until it ends, then back to 40-45.
It takes a special skill set - I call it Combat Driving 101 - to survive the freeways there. LA is bad but predictably bad (and at least the radio is pretty accurate). The SF Bay Area... you never know what it's going to do, and radio traffic reports - fergeddaboudit - 20-30 minutes out of sync with reality.
24 years later, I moved to Raleigh, NC, and once again, marveled at the improvement: Smooth roads and polite drivers.
Ten years later... same old same old, but now i'm seriously retired and almost never have to drive in rush hour traffic... which is, btw, about 4-5 pm here, while it was 3-7 pm back in CA's technology opus of Silicon Valley. Go figure.
Here in Raleigh, a few roundabouts have been implemented, to the annoyance of a lot of locals, but where they'd REALLY do a lot of good, like on '70 at Brier Creek Shopping Center, nobody seems to have the vision to give it a moment's thought. Sad.
I worked on the planning of the 'new town' Woodlands, Tx in the early 80's and there was no interest in using roundabaouts even though there was plenty of space to implement them. The main thoroughfare (at that time) has light after light after light today. I spent a couple weeks there a few years back and did a computation of the percentage of times that I had to stop at intersections with traffic signals while on the main thoroughfare and it was about 75-80%. That road has very wide forested esplanades between the lanes of opposing traffic and roundabouts would be easy to implement, and eliminate the endless cycling signals needed to allow left turns across those wide esplanades. Its very much a "not invented here" blindness, I think.
All of which were seen as better solutions than putting up signs at the merger points that said, "No, YOU Yield to traffic already IN the circle!"
At least Raleigh put a few like that in when they converted two bottlenecks in the City to roundabouts...
:)
I accuse him of having sex with his parking spot. I call it parksex.
Morons everywhere... no city or state has a monopoly on 'em. Stories without bounds.
enjoy the science of delays even more!!! -- j
I'm just curious why driving safer makes no sense... and why people have to be so "desperate" to be first in line, even tho you'll still get 10 feet up the road in the same amount of time?
I leave that 'cushion' for MY safety, and if someone plugs the hole with their car from the right or left lane, I slow down and re-establish the cushion for MY safety. Generally, the folks one or more cars behind me don't even notice my 'cushion' so your scenario isn't part of MY real life. But I sure as hell don't let my cushion space get to be more than about 3-seconds long.
That means "car lengths of space" are hard to guesstimate while driving, but if you can count 2-3 seconds 'gap' between you and the car in front of you, it drastically lowers your chances of being caught by surprise by the driver in front of you.
Think what you want, and don't believe a word of what I say, but I've been driving an average of 10-12k miles per year since I got my license in 1963 (do the math) and have been involved in only one fender-bender where I was at fault and I've gotten EXACTLY ONE speeding ticket in my life (and none when I drove my '69 seven-liter Corvette for about 42k miles.)
Ah, but what the fuck do _I_ know?
Enjoy your beliefs....
Has to do with human reaction times in 'surprise' situations. Leave extra room and it's less likely to happen to you. Works for me. Good luck!
I've seen better behavior in states that post "Take Turns" signs at these places.
A close friend just assumes that those drivers are members of the 'teeny-weenie club.' Makes sense... :)
And the driver cut me off, nearly taking off my left front fender, then slowed in front of me to a crawl and parked in front of me when I pulled off on the shoulder down the road a bit. He eventually gave up and blasted down the road, but it taught me that it's not good karma to piss off anybody who a) has a huge boy-toy truck under his butt or b) might be packing heat to prove he's a 'real man.'
Slow and steady gets you there in one piece.
imnsho... :)
So I just went a lot slower. I was on salary and on my way to a business meeting. He was probably hourly and every minute he dawdled cost him much more than it cost me. Eventually he put the hammer down and disappeared, but that was also part of The Lessons Learned.
Oh, and that reminds me of the time I found myself in a merger-jam approaching one of the tunnels going to Manhattan. A larger, much more expensive car's driver wanted to squeeze me out. He lost that one. My wife complained: He's going to hit you! ... I replied, No, he's not. She asked why... I answered, Because he owns that car and this is a rental. I ended up in front of him into the Tunnel. Ah, the memories of having driven something over 500 or 600k miles in my life.. :)
Strangely enough... I've driven in Italy, the UK, Germany, France, Russia, etc... people don't have this weird "no-cutsy's" routine the dolts do in the states - they see someone comig up beside them, they either speed up or slow down to let them in. Traffic slows down, sure, but it works.
BTW, hogging the 'fast' lane is a ticketable offence in both Oz and NZ. There is virtually no fast lane road hogging based on my experience. (Plenty of speeding tickets are issued and speed cameras are ubiquitous.)
You have to drive overseas for a while to appreciate the advantages of round-abouts, too.
A related phenomenon is the understanding among police that the very last car in a bunch of cars can be seen driving faster than the first car. How can this be possible? Well, the last car is the recipient of the slowing-down and speeding-up that occurs in the middle of the bunch. So at some point he may be going quite a bit faster, to catch up with the rest of them. Also, as the very last one, he's easier to pull over and ticket.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_c...
Or perhaps a climate model.
Notice where more urban/suburban slow-traffic crawls happen on interstate highways... right around on-ramps around rush-hours.
If everyone stuck to the left two or three lanes and let the right lane alone for entering and exiting, speeds in the #1 and #2 lanes would at least double. I figured this out at least 20 years ago, watching traffic and backups in Silicon Valley. Now I see the same on the ring-road interstates around Raleigh.
This is not rocket surgery, kids! It's lousy driver education and attitudes and wrong-headed 'solutions' by alleged 'traffic engineers.'
ah,... whatever... who listens...?
Costs? Benefits? What to measure? Sure... :)
Who really knows who the dominant species were from say, 100 million years up until now? There is still part of our brains that reflect the mindless, strictly reactive beastie in all of us.
http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts/1b...
By the way, I-65 passes through an intersection with I-20/59 that TV and radio reporters have long called "malfunction junction." Years apart, I've seen two cars spin out there in the rain and crash against a guard rail. There a tractor-trailer truck changing lanes ran me off the road and I just barely stopped before a parking lane ended with a concrete barrier.