Can a single car break a traffic jam?

I often try the technique of leaving lots of space and going at a slower, steady pace. One problem is that everyone re-routes around you, and you induce road rage and traffic weaving. The other problem is that unless it's a straight stretch of road, you have no idea what speed is slow enough.

This sort of traffic jam dissipation is only applicable to phantom traffic jams. Here in Los Angeles, traffic jams are caused by too many cars being on the road.<p>At some point, every available square foot of roadway is filled with a car. AI can help limit the amount of extra space taken up by air, but that will only moderately increase the number of cars that it will take before traffic hits. That number of cars will be reached, easily.

Over here, I noticed it is much more pleasant to be stuck in rush hour traffic than off peak. At peak hour, people know the game and know they won&#x27;t get anywhere faster by cutting and trying to fight for every inch. They tend to stay in their lane, merge smoothly and all lanes go the same speed.<p>But as soon as the traffic lightens a bit, idiots just come back to break the peace. I include myself in those.

The game Error Prone is cute, but it mostly shows that it&#x27;s very difficult to keep going a constant speed when your only controls are a binary &quot;Full Throttle&quot; and &quot;Idle&quot;.

The trick is to leave enough room in front of you so you don&#x27;t have to jam the brakes, but not enough room that some fucker will pull in front of you.<p>I also try to jump into the left lane at an intersection stop, if there&#x27;s no left turner, to let people turn right

William J Beaty&#x27;s video on Traffic Waves (linked in the article) is an enjoyable summary of some of these ideas:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iGFqfTCL2fs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iGFqfTCL2fs</a>

When driving I&#x27;ve also noticed another phenomenon. When reaching the crest of a hill there&#x27;s an optical illusion that cars are bunched together. From this viewpoint the driver can see more of the road and vehicles ahead. My theory is that this causes a momentary shock or panic, and it often causes drivers to slam on the brakes, causing ripples of braking behind them.

A long long time ago, I stumbled onto the personal website of a guy who was really into this. He had little simulations of different types of traffic patterns, and how a single car could break it and return it to normal. It was really interesting, but I don&#x27;t have the slightest idea on how to find that website again if it even still exists.<p>EDIT: Found in the comments, this may have been it. Honestly don&#x27;t remember: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;trafficwaves.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;trafficwaves.org&#x2F;</a>

Every time people try to say we can eliminate traffic if we just leave space in between cars, I think of this great article: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jliszka.github.io&#x2F;2013&#x2F;10&#x2F;01&#x2F;how-traffic-actually-works.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jliszka.github.io&#x2F;2013&#x2F;10&#x2F;01&#x2F;how-traffic-actually-wor...</a><p>TL;DR there is an effective maximum number of cars that can pass through a given point of roadway (about 1 car per 2 seconds per lane). No amount of space-leaving is going to chance that.

I want to propose a second more radical suggestion.<p>I think pacer cars might work very well for phantom traffic jams, but I very much disagree about &#x2F;how&#x2F; they should be used. Instead of encouraging an over-capacity jam, I believe that the pacer cars should expressly communicate to other traffic something along the lines of.<p>&quot;Temporary&quot; &#x2F; &quot;Speed Limit&quot; &#x2F; &quot;Follow at XX&quot;<p>On a rear message board.<p>The pacer car would then draw out the stuck traffic in to the space &#x2F;ahead&#x2F; of the jam and encourage the compression wave to expand to the front instead.

Somewhat related to this traffic hobbyist, written on 1998-- <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;trafficwaves.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;trafficwaves.org&#x2F;</a>

Traffic jams are often causes in the way the article suggests, and if you drive at the average speed, instead of the maximum legal or safe speed whenever you can, there&#x27;s a good change the jam will have dissipated just before you reach it, and you&#x27;ll get where you want to go just as fast. This means that the cars behind you (provided it stays behind you) also don&#x27;t have to stop. Their drivers should thank you for saving their fuel rather than curse you for driving too slow.<p>To minimize fuel consumption, it&#x27;s best to drive in the highest gear, at the lowest speed for that gear. Failing that, to drive at a constant speed in the highest gear for that speed. If you do have to slow down, ease off the accelerator and change down gears, rather than use the brake. This means thinking ahead. You can do this when approaching a red traffic light, so that it will be green by the time you reach it.<p>There are a few other tricks to save fuel, such as driving at the minimum <i>safe</i> distance behind a big rig, and using gravity on hills to slow down or speed up.<p>This is sometimes called hypermiling: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Energy-efficient_driving" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Energy-efficient_driving</a>

This game is easy to beat. Wreck most cars except a few, get a single car in the inner circle by slightly bumping it and press and hold the corresponding key.<p>62.8 kilometers covered.

I&#x27;ve always wanted to see what would happen if the government employed workers (maybe traffic cops) to take up each lane on the motorway, and form a line that you can&#x27;t get passed, and drive at a speed just right to unclog traffic jams during peak hours.<p>I wonder how much more throughput and time saved we could get just by having lines of breakers every 50km or so on a highway during peak times.

I have adaptive cruise control in my Subaru Legacy and I have often wondered what will happen when more people have ACC. Or even if I were following another car exactly like mine - would the lag time grow exponentially with more intense stop&#x2F;go or would it even out? Or does it depend on how well the car implements it?

No, at least not for I-405 &#x2F; I-5 near Seattle.<p>These roads, due to a complete lack of effective urban planning and development, are several times over capacity.<p>I like to think that this heuristic would be effective for such cases.<p>* Aim for a hard speed limit (maybe the actual speed limit).<p>* Actually obey the law of this state: Keep Right Except to Pass.<p>* ALWAYS allow merges (from either side) with higher priority.<p>Edit:<p>After reading the github link from one of the other posts I want to expand why I disagree and suggest always allowing merges.<p>It is to allow traffic to leave the freeway (merge right to exit) as well as to enter the freeway (merge left, mostly to enter at all, but also in case they&#x27;re going a long distance or need to get to special use lanes on the left).

I wonder if we&#x27;d have as much stop and go traffic if every car on the road was standard.<p>I drive like this just to avoid using the clutch. I&#x27;ll basically crawl at the average speed in 2nd gear, until traffic speeds up.<p>I suspect truckers may be doing it for the same reason, and their gear ratios mean they would have even more gears to cycle through.<p>Stop and go would be a huge pain for them if they have to come to a full stop.

I wonder how much of this is mitigated by good lane discipline?<p>My SO actually got pulled over the other day (or at least that&#x27;s what the cop used as an excuse) for driving in a passing lane when not passing anything. I said I was glad because it&#x27;s a terrible habit - every lane ending up going the same speed as the slowest driver

Vehicles talking to each other will not break a practical traffic jam. The one caused because one car had to stop for some reason or other, now everyone has to stop or slow down in the same vicinity until there are less cars flowing through the area.

I would avoid blaming any traffic on &quot;non-optimal&quot; driving by other drivers (not leaving enough space so they maintain constant speed, stuff like that), since it&#x27;s just another recipe for road rage.

I just had fun crashing cars. 25 crashed with 1.8km travelled. I know it&#x27;s not the point, but I don&#x27;t care (nod to Icona Pop). I love it. I needed the laugh.

Without AI, the answer today is to drive as fast as possible all the time.

While, in the right environment, a single driver may be able to break a jam, a single driver can create one just about anywhere.

This theory has been running around for a a few decades now. But a couple years ago I read a paper where they were studying traffic jams, and the conclusion is that elastic traffic is the problem, and this technique does nothing really to solve the problem. Instead simply maintaining the exact same spacing in front&#x2F;back of your vehicle does a much better job of avoiding and clearing traffic jams.

This is almost a perfect metaphor for the failings of capitalism, or at they very least the notion that the singular pursuit of selfish greed can lead to ideal outcomes. The selfish need for individual drivers to go as fast as they can leads to a collective failure, here in the form of a traffic jam.

Traffic jams exist because humans drive cars, and humans are not designed to process data at 120 kilometers per hour.<p>This is a major repost but still misses the main problem. When you look at a car in front of you, you perceive it as a stationary wall, not a moving wall. When you slow down, you&#x27;re trying to avoid hitting where the car in front of you <i>is when you press on the brake pedal.</i> You&#x27;re not smart enough to realize that you should be slowing down to avoid hitting where the <i>car will be</i> when that car stops.<p>You do this, and you should not be driving cars. Leaving space in front of you is an inefficient solution to this problem, now you&#x27;re overcompensating even more for the problem.<p>You can try watching one car ahead of the one in front of you to predict when the car in front of you will slow down and need to stop. Your passengers will freak out, constantly thinking you&#x27;re going to hit the car directly in front of you, because they perceive the car in front of you as a stationary wall. In reality, you&#x27;re driving more efficiently.<p>The day when us unevolved meat sacks stop controlling two ton metal bullets can&#x27;t come soon enough.