They have to get up to speed and there are so many on ramps that don’t give enough space to actually get up to highway speeds. And some places (like my fucking dumbass city) have 30 of them spaced only 10 feet apart, so you have a lot of people going really slow getting on the freeway, so everyone else has to slow or stop to avoid hitting them.
Quite a few cities in the Northeast are designed this way, because they were done so in the 1950’ swith the intent of highway traffic doing 40, maybe 45 MPH through town at maximum. To conserve expensive urban land, they have short ramps and merge areas that were appropriate for those speeds, not to mention the lower overall volume of traffic in those times. And now we’re stuck with it, because it’ll be a 200 year long court battle to eminent domain the 427 landowners who are all clinging to five square feet each in the patch you’d require for a longer ramp, all hoping for a fat payout to let go of it.
And nowadays, of course, everyone takes it as their god given right to do 90+ MPH on the freeway at all times, and get frothingly pissed off if they can’t for any reason whatsoever. So the ramps aren’t long enough anymore because no one is using the highway as designed.
There is nothing more American than being in traffic. You’re never more in touch with a systemic failure, yet we blame it on the choices of individual drivers, all the while unaware that we’re part of the problem.
Just ONE car can reduce traffic jams. Try it: leave enough buffer such that when the car in front of you stops, you almost reach their bumper at like 5 MPH but never stop b/c it’s time for them to move again. The guy behind you may never actually stop too.
So you had all these stoppers in front of you, and several cars not stopping behind you.
Enough people do this, and there’s no more stop & go. Just cruise 5mph the whole time (not 10, 0, 10, 0, 10, 0, which sucks).
This is how I operate in most traffic jams, since I only own manual cars & it’s much easier on my leg.
I genuinely don’t even remember any specific scenarios where somebody merging in caused me to have to come to a full stop (where I wouldn’t have had to stop if they didn’t merge). Not saying it never happened, but it was so rare and unnotable that I don’t remember.
I do live in the northeast US, so maybe that has something to do with it, but I don’t usually feel like I spend meaningfully more time in traffic because I let a few people in front of me.
Bonus benefit: my life is measurably better since I stopped getting pissed about people being in front of me. Road rage had such a broad impact on me, even after I got out of the car.
stopped getting pissed about people being in front of me
The world would instantly be a better place if all the mouth-breathers in it could figure this out simultaneously. Wow, you’re pissed off at someone being “in front” of you. That’s because there’s totally an Earth-shakingly significant difference between having 9,784,326 cars in front of you vs. 9,784,325.
I leave a gap between me and the driver in front of me. Rarely does anyone pull into that space. They usually are in the lane that gets them where they need to go
From above the whole thing looks like an accordion. Drivers who tailgate tend to overreact when they see brake lights 50 feet in front of them, compound this by the guy tailgating them and so on. Leave a buffer to absorb this and it smooths out
Yeah but I’m trying to GO smoothly and courteously. Somewhere up ahead someone (or many someones) is stopping or merging badly or doing something else stupid to create these phantom traffic jams.
The CGP Grey video on Traffic is a decent explainer on how traffic happens to begin with and how it gets relieved, kind of like a traffic snake that grows and shrinks, travelling in the direction opposite to traffic.
This City Nerd Video explains how traffic gets exponentially worse as it increases.
It usually starts with someone making a dumb move at a merge, changing lanes or another person forgetting to brake until the very last moment. That’s part of the reason I don’t see much benefit in adding more lanes to a highway save for very few exceptions, since you’ll just have more changing lanes leading to slowdowns and extending a section that was a bottleneck often just shifts the bottleneck somewhere else.
So anyways, I’ll keep preaching to the choir: trains, trains, we need more buses and trains.
Traffic dynamics are really interesting. Even after you clear the obstruction, the traffic jam remains and becomes a “ghost jam” that propagates backwards down the road until it eventually fizzles out.
In order for everyone to just freaking go, their cars would have to be attached somehow.
I wonder if anyone’s ever thought of linking a bunch of cars together so they can all stop and go simultaneously. And hey, since the cars are attached and all need to go to the same place, we can build a track instead of using high maintenance rubber on pavement and-
What I dont fucking get is that even in Europe where even in shitty countries like Hungary and Slovakia we have train tracks that’s about thousandfold what the US has, and we still put shit on Semis and have them drive between cities, cities that are all fucking connected by train.
Why aren’t we fucking putting everything on goddamn fucking trains, and then do only the last miles of the delivery on trucks, they could even be electric as that would eliminate all the drawbacks of electric semis, having them only go short distances
Some sort of linked car-train lane that your car could use self-driving software to enter and leave would be an interesting concept. Like HOV but everyone is linked at the same speed.