And I drove the infamous Somerville Traffic Circle in NJ for decades, too... To 'solve the problems of gridlock at rush hour' they actually built a flyover for the most heavily-trafficked route, and THEN added traffic signals a few blocks ahead of the mergers to the circle to 'throttle traffic,' which didn't really help at all, as everyone raced to the Circle's entrance after the lights had bottled them up for minutes at a time...

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...
:)

Roger that... MANY years earlier, I flipped off a big rig driver who didn't like me getting in front of him after a traffic signal changed on old Route 69 in NJ (Now Route 31, I think... =100-69...)... he soon passed me and nearly cut me off with his trailer, then slowed down and 'waved me around to pass him...' into oncoming traffic.

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.. :)

Whether or not that can be correlated or even measured, I don't know, but I'd bet someone, somewhere, will fabricate some estimate in order to prove some point.

Costs? Benefits? What to measure? Sure... :)

It'd do more good if idiots who won't keep up were compelled to stay OUT of the left lane. This is already the law in many states, but seldom enforced.

What a scary story! That's the thing about road rage, it is such a real and dangerous threat that you have to bear in mind. I try not to engage with other drivers because you are so right, you just never know what kind of unstable person might be behind the wheel in the lane across from you.

Horrific!!!! (smiles)

People need to learn to use roundabouts properly, too, or they don't have the proper traffic smoothing effect.
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.

Have any opinion on the 24/7 multi-passenger (diamond) lanes effect on traffic and local revenues?

Yep, back when I first moved to NC, I blocked a large pickup truck from merging just for the sake of merging and 'getting there first on his part.'

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... :)

You can see the same 'take turns' effect, or lack of it, if you're leaving a large parking garage after a concert or other entertainment event. Some jerks just HAVE to be first in line.

A close friend just assumes that those drivers are members of the 'teeny-weenie club.' Makes sense... :)

ok, THAT did not 'advance the conversation, any more than your post above it....

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....

I recall a study that showed that if one person suddenly slows for a traffic signal that's changing, odds are best that the FOURTH car behind them will either rear-end the third one back or be rear-ended themselves.

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!

Around Eagle, CO, they've been replacing traffic signals with roundabouts just about everywhere. Vail, too...

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.

In '78 I moved from NJ to Silicon Valley for a new job. I marveled at the "smooth roads and polite drivers."

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.

the other night in a mall parking lot, some moron honked, flashed his high beams and passed me as I was waiting for someone to back out of a parking space I wanted to occupy.

Morons everywhere... no city or state has a monopoly on 'em. Stories without bounds.

I've seen that 'backward wave propagation around the circle' video before, but I think it was a few decades ago. Suddenly coming to light now?

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...?

I like it! You made my day!

Assume a spherical cow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_c...

Or perhaps a climate model.

Fluid mechanics does apply, but not very well (it assumes that individual particles are infinitely small).

When we left Livermore in 2005, it would take up to an hour to go the 10 miles to Pleasanton/Dublin area. And that with five lanes each way! No desire to ever go back to that again.

Rewarding theft only means you get more of it. The one guy you let in can easily turn into 20 by the time you get an opportunity to pass. Don't be Neville Chamberlain!

Because your method makes the slowdown worse for everyone behind you, and thus provokes them. If they ran you off the road, they'd be justified.

There are so many frustrating things in our environment that we can't control, we can become very defensive about those that we think we should be able to control.

You have stop lights? What's it like? --giggles--

I've been gone from that area for 3 years - had to go back for a meeting, forgot how sucky the traffic was, and how fast it goes from fair to ugly.

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.