Breaking Up a Traffic Jam!

but what about the poor drivers behind you, they must be pulling their hair out.

... rules say to leave a 2 car gap in front of you at all times for safety reasons. The jam removal is secondary. :)
Only wish we all followed that rule.

I bet that you preventing traffic jams actually speeds up traffic for all the insecure, insecure, ignorant drivers that hate you.

You have a couple of good points. Failure to allow people to smoothly merge causes more hasteful merges that form ripples. As well as people with poor throttle control and foresight create ripples. That's true, and if everyone learned to smooth them out a bit it would make a big difference.

However the way your driving in that video is ridiculous, it looks like your probably going about 30mph on a 60mph highway (I drive i5 through seattle all the time). Every single car on that freeway is going about 10-20mph faster than you. Sure, you might be smoothing a ripple, but your cutting the speed limit in half. That means everyone on I-5 in your lane, for miles and miles behind you is stuck going only 30mph, how is that helping traffic?


I'd be highly enraged if somoene was in the left hand lane going so much slower than the flow of traffic. It makes me angry just thinking about it.

People just need to learn to drive more smooth, let people merge, and biggest of all, when people are merging, they better get up to the correct speed limit or a little above. Too many people try to get on a 60mph freeway going 40mph, they are idiots. if you want to merge on the freeway you better be going at least 60-70, that would clear alot of traffic there.

This is what truckers do by nature. At slower speeds there is a lot of gear shifting. From a dead stop to 25 MPH I'm already in 7th gear. If you can maintain a constant average speed you don't shift as much and it also saves fuel.

I came up with the same thing during my commuting a few years ago. Also, those electronic speed limit signs are nowhere near smart enough to actually achieve that, but certainly go some of the way. ... And it doesn't need to be backed up by radar speeding cameras. All that's necessary is a means to recommend the appropriate speed — the electronic sign, or a smart cruise control, which I kind of designed in my head, but never did anything with it.

Also, when I used to commute, in my time for contemplation I realised that's what _marching_ is all about!

For thousands of years, if you want to move a great mass of thousands of people as efficiently as possible, you''ve got to get them all to move in lock-step! Otherwise you've got all of these waves of people stopping and starting all the time!

... And I used to think that marching was just some stupid brainless thing military people did for no apparent reason!!

just watching your speed was pissing me off lol

When I lived in a city I used to practice smoothing out the flow of traffic. Most drivers behind me seemed to understand what I was doing. Only a few didn't get it, and you could always tell who they were!

The DMV did a research study of two cars driving 20 miles over streets and highways. One car drove slowly and one car drove as fast as legally possible - you guessed it - there was only 2 minutes difference!

There is a comedian who jokes about how folks act differently when they get in a car, verses standing in line at a grocery... funny but true.

Thank you Bill! I've always loved finding those pockets of space on the road. Recently I've started driving slower and leaving space for the calming effect, but I never realized that I could create space and help others too. I can't wait to get in the car tomorrow morning!

all the time. It's funny I never really thought about until you pointed it out.

I've been doing this in The Netherlands for years and indeed it works wonders! You mentioned the trucks, and a way to 'double your positive impact' is to stick next to a truck or a similar driver. Perhaps frustrating some of the people behind you (so don't leave a TOO big a gap), but generally making it easier to loosen the knots in front of you, since more people keep moving at the same speed.

I've been driving this way on the Long Island Expressway for years. I have to admit that the reason I leave lots of room ahead of me is that it's more relaxing than being crammed up against the tail of the driver ahead.

I even have little contests with myself to see how long I can go without hitting my brakes or coming to a full stop.

And, yes, sometimes the people behind me seem to think that the four or five car lengths that I leave ahead of me is going to cause a huge delay for them. Well, that's just irrational but, as you say, they can pass me if they like.

I like to think of the road as a river, with eddies and rapids. I'm the 'Huck Finn' of the L.I.E.

A friend of mine in Australia tells me that during rush-hour, they have have digital signs that dictate the speed limit in high density areas.

This forces everyone to drive the same constant speed (could be as low as 15-20 mph on the highway). The same stretch of highway could have a different speed limit each day depending on the traffic volume.

If everyone is driving the same speed limit with photo radar to enforce it, this helps eliminate the 'speed-up and brake' habits of drivers.

unfortunately, i cant do this in my country. no lane discipline or speed limits...

I was interviewed for NY Times article last week:

THE URGE TO MERGE: SF CALDECOTT TUNNEL
nytimes com/2008/08/03/magazine/03traffic-t html

Amazingly enough, experts interviewed say the same thing: best driver behavior involves leaving large spaces. Then all lanes merge late. (I've always noticed that early merging opens an empty lane and creates "zoom-ahead cheaters," while late merging fixes this problem.)

In Jersey and New York this could be a real timesaver..I'm going to try it..Thanks for the tip..

all the best,
Doc