It's always a good idea to drive without changing speed and without competing with other drivers for bits of headway. A single solitary driver, if they stop "competing" and instead adopt some unusual driving habits, can actually wipe away some of the frustrating traffic patterns on a highway. That "nice" noncompetitive driver can erase traffic waves. I suspect that the opposite is also true: normal competitive behavior CREATES the traffic waves. Suppose we push constantly ahead, change lanes to grab a bit of headway, and always eliminate our forward space in order to prevent other drivers from "cutting us off". If tiny traffic waves appear, we will rush ahead and then brake hard, leaving larger waves behind us. Repeated action causes the waves to grow huge. It’s ironic that the angry people who push ahead as fast as possible might unwittingly participate in "amplifying" the very conditions that they hate so much. The solution seems obvious: drivers with a smooth "calm" style will tend to damp out the waves and produce a uniform flow... and the few drivers who intentionally drive at a single constant speed will wipe out the waves entirely. Just one single car, if it decelerates while approaching a jam, can change the behavior of everyone behind it. And soon these people behind that single car will take the place of everyone in the jam. Your single car can bite a huge chunk out of the region of stopped traffic. If one car refuses to pack together with everyone else to form a "parking lot," the jam can be made smaller. Or if one driver gradually builds up lots of empty space before encountering the slowdown, perhaps that driver can "eat" the whole slowdown. Drivers as a whole would find it much easier switch lanes to avoid becoming trapped in the jam, since the solid-packed region was much smaller. ANTITRAFFIC DESTROYS TRAFFIC. Empty spaces can break up a traffic jam. The two annihilate each other like a positron meeting an electron. It's nonlinear soliton physics. The soliton waves destroy each other, leaving only a slight fuzzy smudge behind. The fuzzy smudge behaves very differently than the original bottleneck: it travels backwards and moves off into the distance. When traffic is sparse, we cannot keep a large space ahead of us, since it's too easy for cars to pass a slightly-slow driver. But several separate drivers could bring less-enormous spaces along with them, and any traffic jam would succumb to the barrage of "antitraffic." Plan WAY ahead. As a commuter I'm encountering the same traffic jams every day. I know what to expect ...so if I planned way ahead and brought a big empty space along with me into the jam, I could use that space to manipulate the jam. I can control the traffic only by applying the brakes. But once I get myself packed in with everyone else, I can do nothing. In order to have an effect, I must behave differently BEFORE the jam, not while trapped inside it. We WANT people to merge ahead of us before that other lane comes to an end. If I fear that someone will leap into the space ahead of me, or if this makes me resentful or angry, then I close up ranks and prevent everyone from merging. Closed ranks create traffic jams. "Cheaters" don't trigger traffic jams, it's the people who try to punish the cheaters who do it. Lane jumpers are not the real problem. People who attempt to punish the lane jumpers by eliminating all spaces commonly cause traffic jams! The goal is to ALLOW PEOPLE TO MERGE AHEAD OF US! When you approach a slowdown, DON'T drive right up to the bumper of the car ahead of you and then stop. Instead preserve your large space whenever you're forced to slow down. Bring large spaces into congested regions. Don't try to immediately create a space when you're already in heavy traffic. That in itself could trigger a jam behind you. And here's a final lesson: a bit of math! In normal un-jammed highways, the outflow from a piece of road is affected by the inflow. If inflow rate gets larger, then outflow rate gets larger too. But once the jam-pattern appears, the outflow rate becomes constant, and the jam will grow larger and larger if the inflow rate is a tiny bit bigger than the outflow. People SHOULD be able to merge. Why was traffic packed so tightly? One obvious reason: to punish the idiots who will jump into any little space. But this sort of "closed-gap" driving would also prevent any necessary merges at off ramps (and at on ramps too, of course.) By eliminating the space ahead of me, I become part of the impenetrable wall, which creates the "dynamic bottleneck" and screws up the traffic at highway ramps. The gear teeth cannot mesh, so the whole machine grinds to a halt. The "zipper" becomes jammed because the "teeth" of the zipper are resentful about new teeth moving into the space ahead of them. The jammed merging lanes are almost like gridlock in a city. City drivers know to never block intersections, since blocked intersections will freeze all traffic. But we highway drivers are ignorant. We close up the gaps when others need to merge. And our behavior creates needless "highway gridlock" during every single rush hour. Ideally a merge-area will act like gear teeth. But suppose that everyone starts defending themselves against opportunistic drivers by eliminating all gaps in traffic. In that case the valid merges cannot take place either. A fight develops, and a traffic jam is created. The jam appears at the merge zone, while a huge region of empty roadway is created downstream.
The traffic jam is ALWAYS the fault of those who refuse to let anyone merge ahead of them. "Just merge behind me." No, that doesn't work, since the guy behind you doesn't want any merges either. Everyone in the whole lane is saying the same thing! Do traffic jams CAUSE THEMSELVES? It goes like this: No. 1 · Traffic is going slow. · Everyone packs together and closes up the gaps. · Fast merging becomes impossible. · Incoming cars create a huge back-up. · Cars must slooooowly take turns merging. · This makes incoming traffic slow down. · Go back to the top of this loop and repeat. This is absolutely fascinating because this self-caused situation has a counterpart: No. 2 · Traffic flows along rapidly. · Nobody closes the gaps (they follow the 2-second rule?) · Merging is easy. · Streams of traffic flow together like a zipper. · This allows traffic to go fast. · Go back to the top of this loop and repeat. To ease this type of jam: · Maintain a large space ahead of your car. · Encourage one, two even three cars to merge ahead of you. · If traffic slows to a complete stop, KEEP TWO CAR-LENGTHS OF SPACE OPEN AHEAD OF YOU. · Never "punish" merging drivers by closing your gap. (Condensed from http://amasci.com/amateur/traffic/trafexp.html)
