Yahoo Autos You can prevent traffic jams by changing one driving habit
The worst kind of traffic jam is a "phantom" traffic jam — those backups that occur for seemingly no reason. Phantom jams leave you sitting there wondering: Why? Fact is, we do know what causes them, and we can change our driving behavior to prevent them.
On a recent road trip, my family got caught in two such jams — each on I-90 in Eastern Washington out in the absolute freaking middle of nowhere. Eastbound, we got jammed up for 15 miles over 1½ hours. Occupants in thousands of trapped cars clogged the cell towers trying to find out why. Turned out the state DOT had set out orange barrels in one lane; at least there was an explanation. On the return trip, even though I checked websites and traffic cams ahead of departure, we got stuck again, for a 30-mile stretch over 2½ hours. This time, no explanation. Traffic eventually and mysteriously broke loose, and everyone took their turn speeding away like a bat outta hell. Probably to find a restroom.
Being stuck gave me time to think about the science of traffic flow. It's a discipline steeped in mathematics, with some human behavior thrown in. If you’re math-inclined, be sure to check out the federal government’s “Revised Monograph on Traffic Flow Theory” or some of the various research out of Delft University in the Netherlands, or MIT. Oh the formulas, oh the charts!
It might be simpler to just watch this now-legendary video from the University of Nagoya in Japan. Researchers put 22 drivers on a circular track and asked them to maintain a constant speed of 30 kph. Sounds easy, right? But guess what happened:
You're no doubt aware of some ways to avoid traffic jams — at least highway jams, as opposed to those on "signalized" surface streets with intersections. For example:
Minimize lane changes, and don't change lanes suddenly.
Look far down the road to avoid suddenly slowing down.
Don’t rubberneck at the sight of an accident or a trooper writing a ticket.
And as we’ve previously told you, do the zipper merge, for the sake of all things holy.
But there is another simple suggestion you might be less familiar with — and that you might not entirely like the sound of. If even only some of us acquired this habit, we’d save ourselves a lot of grief.
It's this:
Maintain following distance. A LOT of following distance. A LOT MORE than you think, far more than the four-Mississippi count you were taught in driver’s ed. Instead, make it more like eight-Mississippi or 10-Mississippi.
What, you say? And let some jerk change lanes and get in front of me? Yes. Exactly.
Here’s why:
When you’re following closely, or even at what we were taught was a safe distance, and a driver ahead moves into your lane or slows down, you tap the brakes. Maybe just for a second. The person close behind you brakes for two seconds, the person behind him for four. 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 the movement of your bowels (how appropriate): a peristaltic reaction.
A simpler term for it: traffic wave or shockwave. The waves build and build, and soon there’s a jam. The folks at the back of the jam will never know that your little brake tap triggered the whole cascading mess. It’s the butterfly effect, played out daily across our highways.
Maintain following distance. A LOT of following distance. A LOT MORE than you think, far more than the four-Mississippi count you were taught in driver’s ed. Instead, make it more like eight-Mississippi or 10-Mississippi.
What happened in that Japanese video is illustrative. Those cars were close. So, as hard as they tried to maintain spacing, they couldn’t. If there had been six cars evenly spaced on the track instead of 22, it would’ve turned out different.
