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You can avoid traffic jams by changing a driving habit


The worst kind of traffic jams are “virtual” traffic jams – backups that happen for seemingly no reason. Ghost traffic makes you sit there wondering: Why? The truth is, we know what causes them and we can change our driving behavior to prevent them.

On a recent day road trip, my family was caught in two such traffic jams – each on I-90 in East Washington, in a place of total bewilderment. Towards the East, we were stuck in traffic for 15 miles for over an hour and a half. The occupants of the thousands of stranded cars that have clogged cell towers are trying to figure out why. Turns out the DOT state had placed orange bins in a lane; At least there was an explanation. On the return trip, even though I checked websites and traffic cams before departing, we hit it off again, in a 30-mile stretch that lasted over 2 and a half hours. This time, there was no explanation. The traffic was finally mysteriously interrupted, and everyone took turns racing like a bat out of hell. Probably to find a toilet.

Being stuck gave me time to think about the science of traffic flow. It’s a math-intensive discipline, with some human behavior included. If you’re into math, be sure to check out the federal government “Revised monograph on traffic flow theory” or some the various studies out of Delft University in the Netherlands, or MIT. Oh the formulas, the charts!

It might be simpler to just watch this now-legendary video from Nagoya University in Japan. The researchers put 22 drivers on a circular track and asked them to maintain a constant speed of 30 km/h. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? But guess what happened:

Surely you already know some ways to avoid traffic jams – at least traffic jams on highways, as opposed to ways on surface roads that are “signed” with intersections. For example:

But there’s another simple hint you might be less familiar with – and you might not quite like the sound of it. If even just a few of us got into this habit, we would save ourselves a lot of grief.

That is:

Maintain the following distance. LOTS of the following distances. MUCH MORE than you think, much more than the four Mississippi you were taught in the driving manual. Instead, make it like eight-Mississippi or 10-Mississippi.

What do you say? And let some people pull the ropes to change lanes and walk in front of me? Right. Exactly.

Here’s why:

When you’re following closely or even what we’ve been taught is a safe distance and the driver ahead moves into your lane or slows down, you tap brake. Maybe just for a second. The person behind you applies the brakes for two seconds, the person behind you brakes four times. Then six, then 10, then 11, 12, 20. You’ve created a ripple effect. Some in the traffic flow game have even borrowed a term from your bowel movements (relevance): peristaltic response.

A simpler term for it: flow wave or shock wave. The waves build and build, and soon there will be a blockage. People in the back of a traffic jam will never know that your little brake hose triggered the whole mayhem. It’s the butterfly effect, played every day on our highways.

Maintain the following distance. LOTS of the following distances. MUCH MORE than you think, much more than the four Mississippi you were taught in the driving manual. Instead, make it like eight-Mississippi or 10-Mississippi.

What happened in that Japanese video is illustrative. Those cars were close. So no matter how hard they try to keep their distance, they can’t. If there were six evenly spaced cars on the track instead of 22, things would be different.

Here in Seattle, which consistently ranks in INRIX’s 10 worst cities for bad traffican electrical engineer at the University of Washington named Bill Beaty became famous, and earned a well written in The Wall Street Journal (registration required), by turning his miserable commute into a test bed for this long-distance running technique. Researchers at several universities have tested his theories and declared them valid. You can read some of his thoughts on his website, trafficwaves.org. (He also has an interesting website called Science hobbyist and more Videos on YouTube.)

A WSJ reporter accompanied Beaty while he demonstrated maintaining a traffic “bubble,” as he calls it (video of their drive-in is at the top of this article). The car moves into his lane without him having to brake. “When the cars merge, I don’t have to slow down, which means no one behind me has to slow down,” he said.

It’s counter-intuitive, because your mind tells you, “I need to get where I’m going, so I should drive faster.” Your instinct is to close the gap with the drivers ahead. “It’s the right philosophy,” Beaty told WSJ. “You move forward, and you think if people keep pushing ahead, people will go faster.” Instead, “it just turns the road into a parking lot.”

This technique does not mean that you drive slower than anyone else. Just like, and most importantly, beyond. It means driving not like a selfish individual but like you are part of something bigger.

Some interpretations of the “bubble” method recommend creating an even distance between the vehicle in front and the vehicle behind, so that the vehicle following you also has a longer distance. But that advice seems flawed to me – that distance between drivers is not something you can control. If the guy in the back is swarming you and you try to split the front and back distance to make up, he’ll keep climbing your keister. So all you did was give up your own back gap to the front. However, other than advocating this seemingly flawed “bilateral control” technique, the video above does a good job at visualizing wave dynamics.

Hey, wait, you say: If the traffic wasn’t so close together, the road wouldn’t carry many cars. Well, there is a lot of discussion about traffic versus density in the academic and government research mentioned above. But common sense will tell you that a larger back gap allows for more stable overall speeds, which means greater throughput. Traffic congestion is the opposite of throughput.

Adaptive journey to win

Now, there’s a lot of promise in stopping traffic waves using adaptive cruise control, as Beaty points out on its website. Of course, you’ll want to adjust your stroke to the largest rear distance it allows, although the more trailing distance the better. If you simply can’t shake off your old bad habit of crowding cars ahead, adaptive cruise can help.

Remember the previous Japanese video? in the following video from a The trial was conducted at the University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignLet’s see what happens when only one vehicle (the silver SUV) has cruise control enabled:

Big difference, right?

Also, less traffic means less idling means less emissions. And great fuel economy: As much as 40%. So you have money before doing this.

Let’s go back to the spooky traffic jams we encounter in East Washington: If motorists look far down the highway while maintaining a good distance afterwards, they will see orange bins and signs. read the warning earlier, and there will be plenty of time and space to merge with minimal deceleration and no braking. No brake light means no jam. As for the incident on the Westbound trip, it’s a classic traffic jam: We’ll never know what caused it. A bunny? Someone is fooling? But you can be sure the brake light is the consequence. Leads to more brake lights. Eventually created a traffic wave over 30 miles long.

Final: Incomplete self-driving car have to save us from all this? This video from PBS ‘”Nova” two months ago, they put their hope in autonomy, but in the last few weeks it has become increasingly clear that full autonomy turned out to be a pipe dream.

As always, we humans can drive on the highway safely and without incident. So back up, avoid the brakes and don’t make waves in traffic.



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