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.
It’s a little of column a and a little of column b. When I’m driving and some absolute piece of garbage is riding directly next to the car to their right, I equate them to a blood clot, which is funny, because they also make me feel like having an aneurysm. I also don’t forgive the driver on the right, because they are more than capable of allowing a space for other drivers to pass.
The absolute lack of awareness on the road is startling. I swear to God, people are looking through straws and their neck doesn’t move.
Building extra lanes, though, does not solve the problem.
No, but they definitely don’t have traffic in Germany. They have the Autobahn, the perfect solution to any and every traffic problem that could ever exist.
You wouldnt say that after trying to get through Berlin or one of the other major cities
I feel like HOV lanes are more trouble than they’re worth because they disrupt traffic flow since people need to slow down when the HOV drivers enter/exit
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.
https://youtu.be/oafm733nI6U?si=dUBMco9Ql-QtLF2a
Broke: thinking cgp greys video is informative and good
Woke: realizing cgo greys video is fucking stupid and car brained
Hey listen bud, I’m a massive advocate for trains and I think automated cars are an unrealistic idea in the near future.
Still, you have to understand the origin of traffic to get a better understanding of how to come to a solution.
“The solution to traffic is passenger trains” is a valid statement but is missing a lot of the intermediary as to how, why and completely skips the root causes of road traffic. That’s why I put the CGP Grey video 1st since that’s the first step, explaining traffic well even if I disagree with its conclusion, then CityNerd’s video 2nd. After the 2nd, the conclusion that public transit would solve traffic because it reduces drastically car volumes should start to come naturally.
While things like merging movements and so on is part of the story, it’s not the whole story.
You see, by saying “traffic jams are caused by merging mistakes and so on” it kinda implies that if everyone drove perfectly a highway lane could carry infinitely many cars. In actually a highway lane has a finite capacity determined by the length of the vehicles traveling on it, the length of the gap between them (indirectly determined by how fast they can start and stop), and the speed they’re moving.
There are finite limits for gap widths and speed determined by physics and geometry. As the system approaches these limits it becomes less and less able to deal with small disruptions. In other words, as more cars move on a freeway a traffic jam becomes more and more likely. The small disruption which is perceived as the cause was really just the nucleation point for a phase change that the system was already poised to transition through. If it wasn’t that event then something else would trigger it.
It is interesting to note that once a highway has transitioned from smooth flow to traffic jam its capacity is massively reduced, which you can see in the graphs in the above link. Another interesting thing to note is that the speed vs volume graph, if you flip it upside down, resembles a cost / demand curve from economics, where volume is the demand and time spent commuting (the inverse of speed) is cost. If you do this you see something quite odd, which is that the curve curls up around itself and goes backwards.
This is less like a normal economic situation (the more people use a resource the more they have to pay, the less people use it the less they have to pay) and more like a massively multiplayer version of the prisoner’s dilemma. For awhile the cost increases only slightly with growing demand, until a certain threshold where each additional actor making a transaction has a chance to massively increase the cost for everyone, even if consumption is reduced. Actors can choose to voluntarily pay a higher time cost (wait before getting on the freeway) to avoid this, but again, it’s the prisoners dilemma. People can just go, trigger a traffic jam anyway, and you’ll still have to sit through it + all the time you waited trying to prevent it.
Self driving cars are often described as a way to eliminate traffic jams, but they don’t change this fundamental property of how roadways work. It’s true that capacity could potentially be increased somewhat by decreasing the gap between cars, since machines have faster reflexes than humans (though I’m skeptical of how much the gap can really be decreased; is every car going to weigh the same at all times? Is every car going to have tires and brakes in identical conditions? Is the condition of the asphalt going to be identical at all times and across every part of the roadway? All of these things imply a great deal of variability in stopping distance, which implies a wide safety gap.), but the prisoner’s dilemma problem remains. The biggest thing that self driving cars could actually do to alleviate traffic jams would be to not enter a highway until traffic volumes were at a safe level. This can also be accomplished with a traffic volume sensor and a stop light on highway on-ramps.
Of course trains, on top of having a way higher capacity than a highway lane, don’t suffer from any of this prisoner’s dilemma stuff. If a train car is full and you have to wait for the next one that’s equivalent to being stopped at a highway on ramp. People can’t force their way into a train and make it run slower for everyone (well, unless they do something really crazy like stand in the door and stop the train from leaving).
You could carry a near infinite amount of cars on a highway if you could instantly accelerate to near the speed of light!
In all seriousness, yes you’re right that there is a max throughput of people per hour even with ideal drivers and cars on a given highway. You simply do not have enough space.
The article was very interesting and informative, but that too assumes many ideal conditions. Re: zipper merging, the author really discounts the affect of confusion causing on cumulative delay. Of course that never letting anyone get in front of you, and decreasing your headway will theoretically let you get to your destination earlier, but you run the risk of needing to detour to an auto collision center. In a 2 to 1 merge, one of the lanes must delay themselves 2 more seconds, everybody playing chicken instead of sharing the delay across the two will cumulatively slow things down on the whole.
This can also be accomplished with a traffic volume sensor and a stop light on highway on-ramps.
This kind of traffic metering does already exist, as you’re probably aware!
But the fact that even just a single rail car holds 360 commuters, equivalent to 180 cars or more on the highway changes the math completely.
But the fact that even just a single rail car holds 360 commuters, equivalent to 180 cars or more on the highway changes the math completely.
Absolutely. The fact that 3 million people pass through Shinjuku station every day is a testament to that.
If all of those people lived in a city in the US it would be the country’s third largest, behind NY and LA. (If we’re going by the entire urban area instead of just within city limits it would be the 20th, just ahead of the Baltimore-Columbia-Towson metropolitan statistical area.)
All in a space that’s smaller than most highway interchanges.
And that’s not even using two-level train cars (which is where your figure for 360 people per train car comes from I think?).
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
Some sort of linked car-train lane that your car could use self-driving software to enter and leave would be an interesting concept. Like HOV but everyone is linked at the same speed.
And hey, since the cars are attached and all need to go to the same place
And voila, you just invented road networks again
I love re-deriving the train when people talk about autonomous cars/trucking and how they can already do the highway part easily
What I dont fucking get is that even in Europe where even in shitty countries like Hungary and Slovakia we have train tracks that’s about thousandfold what the US has, and we still put shit on Semis and have them drive between cities, cities that are all fucking connected by train.
Why aren’t we fucking putting everything on goddamn fucking trains, and then do only the last miles of the delivery on trucks, they could even be electric as that would eliminate all the drawbacks of electric semis, having them only go short distances
AFAIK a big reason for this is because we’re utterly anal about making everyone pay for railways, while roads are obviously necessary for civilization to exist and thus they’re perfectly free to use!
it’s the same corrupt double standard that applies to public transport, it’s just a systemic “oppression” of efficient systems in favour of inefficient ones that let money be funneled into the pockets of asphalt manufacturers and car companies and whatnot.
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.
also, very respectfully to my mom and grandpa (RIP) old people have to stop driving. My mom is 65 and in pretty good shape so she refuses to stoo driving. She only have 2 road modes: Maniac or Tourtle. She’ll alone create a standstill in a highway OR she’ll almosr kill herself and everyone else on the road. No midle ground
