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-

oop, we invented trains

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.

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.

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).

You're not in traffic, you are traffic

It takes but an idiot. And 1/10 people on the road are idiots. So that's an idiot every 100m while commuting. There's no surprise.

I've been watching traffic patterns for a while... Pretty much since I started driving.

I've wanted to answer the question of why does traffic get so bad sometimes?

The best analysis I can give from all of my observations is.... People SUCK at merging. They don't give space, they try to race to the "front" in lanes that are closing.... Nobody actually knows how to zipper merge properly.

Listen, there's basically two things you need to successfully zipper merge:

1. Find an opening where you can fit into
2. Match pace with the traffic you will be merging into.

For anyone in a lane that's being merged into: make space for merging traffic.

I know legally, that the driver entering the lane will have to find space to merge into, and the drivers in the lane where others are merging into, don't have a legal requirement to provide space, but by being a dickhead about it, you're actively choosing to make things worse for everyone. Just give some space. It's really not hard.

Everyone is more interested in getting somewhere fast, rather than doing things efficiently, in collaboration with fellow road users.... So, when someone inevitably gets cut off by someone who simply must be in front, and they have to slow down, it takes a lot of time for the impact from that showdown, to be recovered by traffic behind the offender.

But trying to re-educate millions, if not billions of drivers to not be horrible at merging, isn't something that's realistically going to happen.

Whenever you hear about "congestion" slowdowns, this seems to be the cause just about every time.

I can actively see this on some highways near me, they have an exit on one stretch of highway through a fairly large city, every mile. I can almost time it for when we get to an exit, vs when we get to an on-ramp, simply by when we slow down or speed up, exclusively due to this phenomenon.

Crashes and wrecks are a whole other issue. Between everyone being shit at merging, all the goddamned rubberneckers, and people making generally idiotic choices to change lanes when they have no idea what is going on..... We're fucked.

I don't hate traffic because it's slow. I hate traffic because it's entirely a product of people being stupid.

Drivers love their cars so much they will make traffic jams to spend more time in them.

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.

I will add serious distance to a journey in order to avoid a jam. I will wake at an inhumane hour to avoid traffic. I know it's irrational but sitting in traffic is the worst. My life was so easy when I cycled to work. Literally zero traffic jams for twelve years. Every journey to and from home was fifteen minutes.

they keep switching lanes

How is standing in traffic a real thing? Mfer just pass everyone on your bike!

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.