Sometimes I pick a car in the next lane to track and compare my progress with. Although one of us will sometimes leave the other behind for a few minutes, usually we return to rough parity eventually.
Back when there were tollbooths where you had to pay cash, I remember seeing aggressive lane-changers, tailgaters, etc. pass by and then seeing them waiting in line, having gotten no further than us, at the toolbooth.
Switching lanes in dense traffic does reduce flow and increase everyone's commute time. Cutting across a couple of lanes, exiting the road and then merging back in a few blocks later is even worse. If more people thought of driving as team-work rather than a race we'd all spend less time in traffic. This fellow argues that behavior that slows traffic down is a good idea because if makes him feel good. I'm sorry buddy, but you're an idiot. You're taking actions that do not benefit you and harm me because you lack the mental discipline to relax and stop treating traffic like a race.
Here is a suggestion for those of you who are currently like this guy but are willing to try driving smart for a change: Don't alternate days. Get into one lane and stay there and continue to do so for a couple of weeks. Listen to the radio. Think about stuff you need to think about. Zen the #$%^ out. Once you unlearn your moron-driver habits you'll arrive at your destination a lot less stressed out and you'll have the peace of mind that you're not one of the morons adding to the problem.
Funny you should say that, that's my family motto: "Qui stupidi sunt, ut strenuus me".
That he thinks it is ok to cut through residential neighbourhoods because the freeway is backed up is more than stupid, really. It is dangerous and unfair. I was going to say that, given the apologetics around this strategy, that he's being a little tongue-in-cheek. But when he opened with "the really painful part of being stuck in traffic is not, really, the actual amount of time that it takes to get from Point A to Point B" it was pretty clear that we were going to be looking for wisdom and intelligence from other sources.
This guy did a fantastic mini-study of traffic wave systems, and has worked out techniques that go one step further than what your describing - actively cancelling out traffic jams by allowing cars to freely change lanes for a long distance ahead of you.
How about not going the route of "zen the #$%^ out." I prefer the drivers around me to be aware of their surroundings and conscious of their driving, not lost in dreamworld.
Driving in a congested freeway does not need all your faculties. Most people do it on auto pilot.
When you are fully alert, it leads to frustration , lane jumping and road rage. So I agree with GP that you need to mellow yourself down during long stop-n-go traffic. Not to the point of falling asleep on the wheel of course. But I don't think everyone needs to be combat ready either.
When I'm stuck in traffic, I consider that a time to submerge the ego, embrace the virtue of patience, and realize that the goal of all drivers should be for everyone to get everyone unstuck and return to normal traffic flow.
So rather than sit bumper-to-bumper, I will open a car-sized space ahead of me, and intentionally allow "line jumper" cars to enter it. Rather than alternately hitting the gas and brake, I'll just let my car roll, smoothing out the wavelike interactions in congested traffic.
If you stop thinking purely of your own self-interest, you can act to improve the overall flow of traffic, rather than just try to get yourself out of it as soon as possible. Think of it as an engineering problem. Instead of how to get 1 person home as quickly as possible, try to get 10000 cars to their destinations with the lowest median travel time, using only your ability to control one car in the flow of traffic.
Here is a suggestion for those of you who are currently walking from place to place: Don't walk, run. Start running and continue to do so for a couple of weeks. Listen to music. Once you unlearn your moron-walker habits, you'll arrive at your destination a lot faster and you'll be healthier overall, and you'll have the peace of mind that you're not one of the morons adding to the problem of slowing down runners by walking in front of them.
What I dislike about traffic isn't the delay so much as the cognitive load. I will often take a temporally longer route if it means I am not constantly watching for lane-changers cutting in front of me and then suddenly braking.
This is why driving is exhausting. There's always a few people who, evidently lacking any real stimulation in their lives, feel the need to constantly jockey for positions on the road, endangering everyone around them for a mere ego trip. It seems like many of these drivers view their driving habits as reflections on them as a person; e.g. they cannot appear weak by yielding to others (even if yielding produces an optimal result, time-wise).
I can't wait for driverless cars. We are the ones who make traffic much worse because we have to have our own way.
There seems to be an implicit assumption that people who constantly jockey for position and those who value safety and orderly progress will end up using essentially the same driverless car OS.
Unless the field is heavily regulated, I imagine that car manufacturers are going to tune and market their cars according to their existing brand identities: safety, economy, performance, "thrill", and so forth.
It'd definitely be an improvement, but I also think it'll take decades to work out the kinks.
I think once we have good statistics on how different strategies affect traffic and accidents, some states will fairly quickly respond with requirements for how driverless cars must act based on that data.
I'm speculating on this being pure selection bias (and the natural desire for all humans to cherry pick something of which to feel superior about).
I'm a middle of the road kind of driver. Almost an equal number of people pass me (sometimes at crazy speeds) as I pass myself. My dad is a slow and steady type (and also feels superior about it), so I get to hear all his "stories" about how so and so passed him and sped up fast but hit every light just like he did, but he wasted less gas (or some other reasoning). However, he conveniently doesn't note the likely five other times in the same scenario where the guy hit every light and left my dad in the dust.
Personally, I notice people I pass a lot because of my dad's comments, and am very self conscious of when I pass somebody but get nowhere. However, most of the time, I passed that person because they were just driving too slow (I'll not slow down and go 5 mph under the speed limit just to make some random person happy), and even if they are going the speed limit, if they drive inconsistently (hit the brakes, slow down/speed up randomly, etc), I just want to be away from them and somewhere safer/less stressful to drive.
I use cruise control a LOT, so I'm annoyed at having to hit my brakes for no reason other than some stranger's whim.
Sometimes we aren't jockeying for position, we are just getting away from somebody.
Very true, my man. So I have no illusions whatsoever that I'm getting there faster. I'm getting there with less stress than if I calculated, though. And since I'm proactive about letting people pass (I guarantee you'll never get stuck behind me because I'm matching the guy in front of me and have space for you to merge in front), I'm fairly confident I'm not holding anyone back.
I tell this story all the time to help clients understand that customer perception is more important than reality:
"SOME years ago, executives at a Houston airport faced a troubling customer-relations issue. Passengers were lodging an inordinate number of complaints about the long waits at baggage claim. In response, the executives increased the number of baggage handlers working that shift. The plan worked: the average wait fell to eight minutes, well within industry benchmarks. But the complaints persisted.
Puzzled, the airport executives undertook a more careful, on-site analysis. They found that it took passengers a minute to walk from their arrival gates to baggage claim and seven more minutes to get their bags. Roughly 88 percent of their time, in other words, was spent standing around waiting for their bags.
So the airport decided on a new approach: instead of reducing wait times, it moved the arrival gates away from the main terminal and routed bags to the outermost carousel. Passengers now had to walk six times longer to get their bags. Complaints dropped to near zero."
"Sasser (et al) provide good examples of both managing the perception and the expectation of waiting times. For the former, they offer the example of ‘the well-known hotel group that received complaints from guests about excessive waiting times for elevators. After an analysis of how elevator service might be improved, it was suggested that mirrors be installed near where guests waited for elevators. The natural tendency of people to check their personal appearance substantially reduced complaints, although the actual wait for the elevators was unchanged. "
I once worked in a building that installed television sets near all elevators. Unfortunately, those televisions were almost universally tuned to ESPN or Fox News, when not simply turned off. I usually just took the stairs.
Of course, the fact that switching lanes or not doesn't make a difference in how fast you get to your destination does not imply that everyone switching lanes doesn't make it slower for everyone.
Regardless of their perceptions or actual travel speeds, the lane-switchers could be providing a much needed liquidity between the more dynamic right lanes (with entrances and exits) and the more static left lanes. Perhaps it's in doing so that they unwittingly ensure that everyone arrives at the same time. (Although it's almost certainly not the optimal time…)
I've assumed similar things, though I recognize the 'turbulence' argument below. In general, it does seem that as one lane slows down a bunch of people jump to the faster lane, quickly slowing that one down.
Regardless, for me the best strategy is to almost never switch lanes. Even when I do switch, 15 minutes later I see somebody that I had passed earlier zipping by me in another lane. There is no value in switching for me that I can determine, and my commute is much more pleasant when I stop thinking about how to get one car length ahead. Whether the lane switchers improve efficiency or reduce it doesn't change that equation for me.
I said 'almost never'. There are a few places on my commute where free lanes are predictable - everyone is merging right to try to get to get onto some interchange, that so several lanes back up, while the people who are trying to stay on the same road can move left and travel quickly. But even then, what are you optimizing for? Maybe 15seconds? Sure, it is more than that in the moment, as you can sit in the slow lanes for a few minutes, but all you do if you move left is rush ahead to the next back up.
I'm always torn between the idea of liquidity or turbulence. Intuitively, turbulence makes sense, but then what happens to facilitates people in the left lane exiting at their destination?
I'd love to see some work done to figure this out.
Lane switchers are transverse waves. Acceleration and braking are longitudinal waves.
I am of the opinion that lane switchers have very low impact on traffic speed, whereas people who gun the engine and slam on their brakes are most directly responsible for slowdowns.
Of course, this presumes that the lane switcher does not switch in a manner that causes someone to slam on his brakes.
Thus, if my theory is correct, attempting to smooth out the longitudinal speed waves should take priority over transversely vibrating cars that could potentially exploit that strategy to move faster than the rest of traffic, at the expense of everyone else.
I don't know how it is elsewhere, but in the Toronto, Canada area, driving behaviours have gotten really bad over the past 20 years.
We have the worst kind of lane switchers. Here, they often jump into the short lane on the right, which is reserved for cars entering and exiting the road, to cheat back in. This is a real problem, because they slow down traffic even more when they have to force their way back in.
The counterintuitive solution to this is to always make room to let those people back in. You aren't helping them "cheat", not really. You are keeping a potentially dangerous driver in front of you, where you can more easily keep an eye on them, and allowing them the opportunity to get the hell away from your car.
The philosopher Nick Bostrom has an interesting view about this question, based on the selection effect[1]: if you consider your presence in the traffic as a random sample from "observation acts", then you are more likely to be in the wrong lane (and hence would benefit from switching), simply because it is denser, i.e. it entails a higher probability mass for obversations of that type.
What I do in crawling traffic is stay in 1st gear at a steady pace and stay in the same lane to reduce the annoyance of starting & stopping so much. You'll notice that large semi trucks do this too. It really benefits everyone if more people did this.
I often find that by moving right I pass a TON of people who shifted left in anticipation of heavy traffic ahead.. left lanes back up, right lanes open up.
Also, I find that truck drivers have a preference for maintaining a consistent low speed, rather than doing stop/start all the time. So I like to get in the slow lane with them, switch to a low gear, and drive using only the accelerator, losing imaginary good-driving points every time I have to touch the brake. Slower or faster overall? Meh. It's a lot less work/stress, which is a good trade as far as I'm concerned.
If I'm not in a hurry I go to the left so I don't feel like I have to monitor quick-cutters from two directions and it makes the whole drive easier. If I'm in a hurry I consider each lane like its own Slinky, expanding and contracting; my method is after my lane has a good run where I'm passing others, I switch to any other lane and hope to catch it in the right Slinky stage.
Seems to work better than sticking with a lane. Probably just the placebo effect, but I'll take it.
> ... the act of changing lanes, and thereby briefly overtaking the car which up until a moment ago was in front of you, makes you significantly happier than just sitting there like a passive schmuck. Which is why we all do it.
> In other words, if you want to understand utility functions, don’t talk to an economist.
It seems like talking to an economist works pretty well here.
If I am executing a poor strategy that doesn't actually help me get my job done any better, I shouldn't be happy about it. Especially if I know what I am doing is ineffective.
If you know that the stay the lane strategy that you are executing is optimal and that the lane switching doesn't help, then you should just stop being so frustrated. The high intensity switching won't get you there faster. Accept it, move on.
I liked my nexus 7 tablet a lot. One day I dropped it, the screen was smashed, and it was useless. I was a tiny bit sad (essentially, I lost $200), but then I just went an ordered another and moved on. Because I knew about the sunk cost fallacy, I could just unemotionally do what was optimal.
You don't get it. The whole point is that the average person is willing to switch the time he might gain from not switching lanes with the happiness he gains from the appearance of progression. The "goal" of saving time on the way to work/home/other has value because people choose to give it value, and when they don't - it becomes meaningless.
I do get it. The people are irrationally pleased by the illusion of progress. Upon learning that their strategy is ineffective, executing the broken strategy should bring them no utility.
No, you obviously don't. The notion of "effectiveness" exists only when there is an agreement on the goal. If my goal is to have fun while driving - then I don't care about the type of "effectiveness" you have in mind, nor should I. And there isn't a single thing you can say to convince me that saving 5 minutes during commute is objectively more important than having fun while driving. This is also why we usually walk from place to place instead of running: walking is slower, but running and getting tired is not very fun: and most people choose fun over speed. People are not computer software, and what's important to us is not defined by god.
This is also why utilitarianism in ethics is ridiculous.
> This is important: the really painful part of being stuck in traffic is not, really, the actual amount of time that it takes to get from Point A to Point B. Rather, it’s the “stuck” bit.
I've noticed this tends to not matter so much if you're not the one driving, more so if you're in the backseat. Self-drive cars anyone?
No thanks, I love to drive. Even as ridiculous as other drivers can be, I love to drive.
Driving brings with it challenges. Strategy, skill, timing, spacial recognition, etc. It also brings with it a pure feeling of freedom. I believe driving is under-appreciated and that leads to the terrible driving habits exhibited daily. Those who dont care, those who arent even driving but day dreaming, doing makeup, reading, using the phone, etc. It is under-appreciation coupled with lack of respect for being in control of a 2000LB+ piece of metal and fuel that can make driving seem like a chore rather than a joy.
The stress of commuting isn't from the physical act of driving, but from having to negotiate a crowded space. Regardless if it's a highway, bus, or a sidewalk, when you're in a crowd, you're forced to play a zero-sum game with the people around you. Even in cultures where people don't drive, the commute is listed as one of the largest stresses people experience.
Self-driving cars are great because for the first time, you have a machine that commutes for you. There's no competition to get in the car, no competition to sit down in the car, and once the car starts moving, you don't have to care about how the car navigates the competition on the road.
It's true that on the large scale, it's less efficient than public transportation, but on an individual level, it's the best option.
>The stress of commuting isn't from the physical act of driving, but from having to negotiate a crowded space. Regardless if it's a highway, bus, or a sidewalk, when you're in a crowd, you're forced to play a zero-sum game with the people around you.
I disagree. The stress from driving doesn't come just from navigating a crowded space. It comes from the potential consequences of making mistakes. If I bump into someone walking on foot, it's no problem. Once I'm on a bus/train/etc. you have your own space. Granted, it might not be a lot of space, and sometimes it might be uncomfortable, but it's hardly stressful.
Bumping into another car when driving is a completely different beast. Now I need to deal with insurance companies, and it might cost me a lot of money. Or I hit something inanimate and I'm still doing a lot of damage to my car. That's where the stress comes from.
Related observation:
I have an hour/hour-and-half commute, and I've noticed in particular that it doesn't pay off in any noticeable way to speed (~10-15 over) on the interstate. At best you shave off a few minutes, but those saved minutes can easily be eaten back up by traffic and traffic lights in the non-interstate parts of the commute.
I will only switch lanes when I can see what is causing the blockage. If it's an accident to one side, I get to the other. This avoids the mess of merging at the last minute.
Having tested this by noting the positions of large distinct trucks that I can see form a distance, I've noticed that I do get through the jam faster this way.
At one point I tried to do something like this on my commute (before I switched to using the train). I wrote a simple Android App which would plot time and position during the entire commute and I'd decorate it with 'all lane #1', 'all lane #2', etc. The idea was to plot the 'currents' which is to say which lanes were faster at which points of the commute. Needless to say there is a huge time dependency. There is also a 'kids' correlation where non-school days are faster than school days (which I found interesting). The train takes a bit longer (less than worse case driving, a bit longer than the median driving time) but being able to read totally makes up for that.
We have arguments in the car from time to time, for we live just north of a half-mile stretch of road that is is congested for most of the daylight hours. My argument is that switching to the street a couple of blocks over produces the illusion of progress, but no real gain. Sticking to the nearer road is obviously stop and go, but lacks a couple of bottlenecks further down, and is thereafter faster.
I'm not sure whether my reasoning convinces my wife, or she just finds the left-hand turns inconvenient.
Changing lanes makes sense when there is a substantive reason to do so. The other lane moving faster is not substantive; it's observation. If you have no idea why it's moving faster, you have no idea whether switching will help.
But if you drive the same route every day, it is possible to find inflection points in the traffic patterns, where you want to go one way and a significant portion of the traffic wants to go another. Optimizing around these points is a good reason to change lanes.
Switching lanes doesn't make me happy. Accepting the situation makes me happy. Angling for a few seconds benefit, dodging other anxious drivers etc makes me surly and unhappy.
It's not about getting anywhere faster. It's about not being trapped, and about having control of my own situation. Hell, I'll drive 12 hours rather than spend 6-8 dealing with airport bullshit, for precisely that reason. I want to be in control, and I don't want to be trapped.
Let's say you have to drive 100 km. Half of the distance your lane moves at 100 km/h, and the other half your lane creeps along at 10 km/h.
So you'll spend 50 / 100 + 50 / 10 = 5.5 hours in the car, at an average speed of 18.18 km/h.
For every one minute you spend passing other cars, you'll spend 10 minutes watching other cars whiz by you!
Even though the fast and slow distances are evenly distributed, all drivers perceive that they're in the wrong lane.