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Rude Drivers Reduce Traffic Jams
BuzzSkyline writes "Traffic jams are minimized if a significant fraction of drivers break the rules by doing things like passing on the wrong side or changing lanes too close to an intersection. The insight comes from a cellular automata study published this month in the journal Physical Review E. In effect, people who disregard the rules help to break up the groups that form as rule-followers clump together. The risk of jamming is lower if all people obey the rules than if they all disobey them, according to the analysis, but jamming risk is lowest when about 40 percent of people drive like jerks."
especially on the Belt Parkway where people seem to slow down to 30mph to go over a bridge
Of course rude drivers ease congestion. When they kill someone because of their stupidity, not only will that person not drive again, but they'll probably lose their license, so they won't either!
The problem of cars "clumping" is due to the "rule abiding" drivers following each other too closely. This is in fact not rule abiding.
A reasonable space must be left between each car to provide enough extra slack to handle unexpected events like braking and slowing. When people follow too closely, this slack is all but eliminated thus causing each unexpected event's effect to become magnified. A quick tap of the brakes causes a chain reaction resulting in a traffic jam. Leaving enough space to handle an unexpected event provides each driver extra time to react.
In addition, since the additional slack allows for longer reaction times, a faster average speed can be achieved. Bob Dobbs would be so proud.
Funny. When I have driven there, I thought that ppl were actually pretty nice, though fast.
In fact, I normally speed at about 9 over, but was being passed all over in Atlanta.
Another nice place was Seattle, but they tend to be slow.
Denver Colorado has some horribly rude drivers (esp. Highlands Ranch), but these are the types that cause jams. They like to drive in left lane AND go slow. I do a lot of passing on the right because ppl here are so bad. Likewise, they like to jam up. I do my utmost to get pass idiots like that and be in the open where I do not have to worry about bad drivers. Drivers here will actually try to prevent you from passing them and will flip you off if you do. We have far too many Texans and Easterners.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
IMO, a lot of problems could be avoided if people respected all the rules of the road, and not just the official ones. For example, I respect anyone's right to drive at whatever speed they feel comfortable with. If that's at, above or below the speed limit I don't care. However, no matter how fast you're going, if there's someone behind you who wishes to go faster, move over to the right. It's not your job to set speed limits, the cops do that, and they exercise discretion too depending on the traffic and time of the day.
What gets me really frustrated is people in the left lane, going at or slightly below the speed limit, with a LONG line behind them. It's situations like these that cause problems, as people who wish to go faster try to get around the slowpokes.
In my opinion, if people simply moved over for a faster car, kept the left lane open for passing/faster traffic, then the vast majority of weaving cars and "jerks" on the highways would disappear.
It's a big peeve of mine. I drive faster than the speed limit, I'll admit it. If I'm in the wrong, the cops will pull me over. However, get out of the left lane if you're going slow and there's 10 cars tailgating behind you!
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That depends on the loudness of your horn. If it displaces enough air to actually move the cars forward, you might be a helpful jerk.
Well, in Germany it would be against the law to change early. It has been shown that driving till the end, and then merging as "one from the left lane, one from the right lane" is the most efficient way to handle ending lanes. Therefore the law demands that. It's called "Reissverschlussverfahren" ("zipper procedure").
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
As somebody has already mentioned in the comment on PhysicsCentral, a realistic model should take into account the dependence between the probability of causing an accident resulting in a traffic jam and the driving style. I could read only the abstract. If the parameter q is the only parameter used, it is not entirely surprising that they got the results they got. In such a model, the rule-obeying drivers driving in the same direction stick together. Rule non-obedience makes the fluid more compressible. Shock waves in compressible fluids appears at higher velocities. It is surely nice their model agrees with the intuition. I would not call such a simplified model realistic, though.
It's not that throughput is cut down, it's that if you leave that much space, someone will move into it. In rush hour, it's IMPOSSIBLE to maintain more than a 2-3 car distance at any speed, because someone will immediately occupy a 5-8 car distance the moment it is created.
If someone is passing on the wrong side, then someone else already being rude and breaking the rules by refusing to yield the passing lane.
The other day, a person was changing their tire on the shoulder of the road facing the opposite direction (was a 4-lane road, 2 lanes in each direction, separated by a 20 foot or so median) and traffic on my side of the road came to a halt. Once I made it to the front of the line of traffic, in the lane (going the opposite direction) nearest the tire-changer, a car in the lane next to me and slightly ahead of me was gawking at the scene so hard they started drifting HARD into my lane. They were completely mesmerized by someone changing a frigging tire. To the point that they weren't even conscious that they were still driving a car.
I swear I don't get it. I had to blare my horn at them to get them to get back over into their lane, and they had the temerity to flip me off! Luckily for me, I drive a large truck and was able to pull in front of them at the next light where I stopped, put on my hazards, drug them from their car and threw them into traffic. No, of course I didn't. However, it's interesting how rage-filled we people get in traffic. I am trying to get it under control, but cannot abide selfish, stupid unaware drivers. I hate them with a burning passion.
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While they make the situation better for everybody, the people breaking the rules benefit the most. This is sort of like the "tragedy of the commons," with a twist. In the tragedy of the commons, the people who don't break the rules don't derive any benefit. In this situation, they're at least a little bit better off than if nobody broke the rules. Everybody has an incentive to try to be in that 40%, though. (Some people, like me, follow the rules dogmatically and altruistically.) I guess what's called for is some sort of automagic lottery system by which 40% of drivers in high-traffic situations are notified in real-time that they are being encouraged to drive more aggressively. AI researchers, get on that.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
I know I slow down when people tailgate me very badly (within a meter), and speed up again when they change lanes. It's a guilty pleasure.
Honestly, it's the only safe thing to me do. If I have someone driving that close behind me I'll need more time to brake if something happens up ahead, to prevent the person behind me ramming into me.
Give me space, and we'll go a nice fast speed. I'll be happy to let you pass me and will move to the right. Ride my ass and expect to go under the limit.
the safe thing to do is you should have already switched lanes (if you're in the left that is) by the time they got to you if you see them coming up.
Cute. But actually the paper is more about the probability of forming jams, not about getting rid of jams once they've already formed.
The conclusion is more like: Though traffic rules are designed to lead to orderly flows, the lowest jamming rate (under certain conditions) actually occurs when some fraction of participants ignore the rules.
(As a side note, it's a bit of a pet-peeve of mine when people make fun of studies by saying "That conclusion is so obvious! What a waste of time!" Common sense, hunches, and gut feelings are often wrong, which is why we do rigorous research to get at the right answers. And even if the general conclusion is obvious (in hindsight, mind you), rigorous research means that we can say something about error bars and make specific statements about applicability and predictability of models.)
the safe thing to do is you should have already switched lanes (if you're in the left that is) by the time they got to you if you see them coming up.
This isn't always possible. Often, there are people in the right hand lane going 70-75 mph and passing the speed limiters in the left lane who are traveling 65 mph. Just because you want to go 85 mph doesn't mean the slower motorists should automatically bow to your speedy abilities. This would, in my opinion, mean that *you* are driving like an asshole.
This is *most* evident when two tractor trailers are passing each other on a major two or three lane highway. But basic congestion causes it too... and whenever you drive like an asshole when there is already congestion... you are only going to make it worse.
Corollary: I've always thought cops should actively seek to give tickets to motorists who get passed on the left by drivers who are traveling at a legal speed limit. That behavior is just a dangerous as the asshole who weaves in and out of traffic. So, slow drivers in right-hand and middle lanes are assholes, too.
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I'm with you there, I used to like to speed. Now I like to cruise in the slow lane, and I have the opposite peeve: Asshats who refuse to use the two empty lanes on my left to pass, and ride my frickin bumper. I'll give em a minute, then the foot comes off the gas. Had one guy wait until we got down to 35 before he passed me. So sorry, is changing lanes really that hard?
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
1. "hypermilers" who don't understand lights are timed for the speed limit, and if you don't get up to speed in a reasonable amount of time, you're just going to waste all that gas at red lights.
2. During rush hour, the problem on "surface" streets is that lights can't be long enough to allow everyone to go through during the green light, so those people just sitting there when the light turns green are racking up the number of cars that are going to get stuck for an extra cycle... but the problem, as I see it, is people have largely stopped honking, so they'll just sit behind such an oblivious person and just wait. If people honked, we could get things moving again. It doesn't have to be a nasty lean on the horn, just a toot-toot.
And lately, the past year or so, I wouldn't necessarily call them "hypermilers" but so many people seem unwilling to even get up to the speed limit, let alone exceed it by a few miles per hour, as if you're going to get a ticket for 48 in a 45... I know the police aren't going to give me a ticket for 5 miles over, and I often get passed by cops when doing so.
He's a thing I do: When the light in front of me turns red, I get my foot off the gas, and I let the car decelerate towards the red light.
When I'm in the zone, I pretty much don't stop at red lights because they have the time to turn back to green before I get to them.
Now, here's the problem with that: The masses of idiots who are in a fucking hurry to go park on the red. They cut me off, and then I have to stop behind them while I wait for them to start up again when the light turns green. Some of them are salvageable, as after seeing me do my thing for a few lights they understand the principle and start laying off the gas when they see the next red, some are not, and insist on cutting me off and, I dunno... win the street race going on in their demented little heads. First one wasting gas and brake lining wins! Woo!
Anyway, leadfoot, remember that red lights mean "stop accelerating", not "this is the finish line to the race, quick, get here before anybody else" :)
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