Slow down a bit to create another buffer. You can even do this before they have merged, as part of the bit where you allow them to safely merge.
I think if you reflect a bit you'll find you are being the same kind of person as them, if you are getting angry that you have to slow down and give up space for someone else. I understand some people can be aggressive though, that can be frustrating regardless of the outcome.
I don't think you're understanding. The point is that 20 people in a row will take advantage of your buffer to slow you down again and again and again, which makes you get to your destination later... because they're being selfish to get somewhere faster, and you're not so you get to where you're going slower.
We're not talking about where they're changing lanes to take the next exit. We're talking about where your lane happens to be moving faster, so they merge in front of you in an unsafe way to take advantage of that and just stay there. Why should you be expected to give them space, as you suggest? How is that fair, that they should get to their destination faster instead of you? Do you not see how that's going to rightfully make someone angry? When they should be waiting for a safe space to open up, rather than forcing you to slow down to create one?
I understand perfectly, 20 years driving, I think people just don't like that the safe answer is to be slow. You will not fix others behaviour, so your options are be slow and generous, get out of the chaotic lanes (unless that's all of them), or join them and be aggressive, claim space, be stressed and annoyed your whole trip.
There is no solution to traffic here sorry, this is more about managing your own frustration and expectations when faced with people at their worst, in the worst form of transport.
The total, confirmed, 100% effective solution is to never commute by highway during peak hours, but few get that option.
I object to the "late" argument made by etho's parent. The difference in time to destination will inevitably be dominated by lights, in city travel, not by modest speed differences (say 45 vs 55) on a highway. Being safe & out of the way is the trick! It would be nice if we got rid of left & u turns and build our roads for that!
The subsidies for cars is crazy when you look at it from that perspective. What you need to do is invest a lot of money in areas and systems that can make it better over time. In the end you are going to spend less.
Ehto is correct and this is the way. I'll go further and say that if someone is tailgating you and it's pissing you off, generously let them pass. Literally pull to the side of the road if you must.
The issue is that when you slow down, you’re (a) creating ‘turbulence’ in the traffic flow with increased speed differential between cars and increased lane changes, which increases accident risk for everybody, and (b) it’s not even solving the problem because you still perpetually have some impatient driver wedging themself in directly in front of you, deleting your buffer zone.
It’s safer to drive a little closer, keep up with other traffic and defend what gap you can in front of you.
Agree with your conclusion here, though. The best response is to simply not drive in this kind of traffic.
Hard disagree. It is not safer to ignore your safety buffer. It is certainly not safer to defend your buffer.
If traffic is very busy, the trick is to just accept people will wedge in front of you and keep going slightly smaller each time to increase the buffer again. You might create 'turbulence', which might possibly decrease the safety a bit for all the impatient drivers doing the wedging. But it increases your own safety. And therefore also that of the people following you and your passengers.
I'm also not convinced on the 'turbulence' part. Keeping a buffer smoothes out any sudden speed variations of the people in front of you, which makes the traffic behind you flow better.
And it might maybe feel a lot slower to let a 100 cars go in front of you on your commute, but just driving 99km/h when the person in front of you does 100 is enough to increase your gap and it makes a whopping 1% of difference.
The only thing is: sometimes a road is just too busy and the space for a buffer just isn't there to begin with. At that point the speeds should go down to accommodate the smaller buffers, which is actually what happens here in the netherlands as long as there aren't too many people ignoring the speeds advisory boards above the highway.
> The issue is that when you slow down, you’re (a) creating ‘turbulence’ in the traffic flow with increased speed differential between cars and increased lane changes, which increases accident risk for everybody, and (b) it’s not even solving the problem because you still perpetually have some impatient driver wedging themself in directly in front of you, deleting your buffer zone.
That's very obviously not true. Slowing down always reduces energy in the system and always reduces global turbulence. It's one of the reasons that countries that lower speed limits see journey times reduce.
Is there a statistics name for the last part? I'd like to compare different countries. It's definitely NOT true in Colombia at least, which makes me believe OP more.
We in Colombia had a public service announcement where it showed someone driving really fast (while still respecting semaphores), and another one going with just enough speed. In the end, they both reach the last semaphore almost at the same time and then they part ways. Essentially it shows that driving crazy fast in the city doesn't necessarily gets you faster to your destination.
Now that I'm an adult, I tested it several times, and it matches 90% of my attempts, but that's in the city, with semaphores. No way I'd think letting everybody steal everybody else's buffer would provide for a reduction in journey time, even in highways. You're adding items to a queue, it'll take longer.
Now, it is probably safer, but we can only take so much even if we are not in a rush.
Slowing down on a busy highway does not reduce turbulence at all, it add chaos and unpredictability to the system. Once car suddenly slowing down to create a buffer zone causes the car behind to slow more and more and can often lead to a stop further back. This has been proven time and again on closed loop systems studying highway traffic flow. They are known as "phantom" traffic jams or shockwave traffic jams. Example, https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13402-shockwave-traff...
> Slowing down on a busy highway does not reduce turbulence at all, it add chaos and unpredictability to the system. Once car suddenly slowing down...
I agree that slowing down "suddenly" causes turbulence. However, slowing down *gradually* allows you to build up a safety buffer which in turn allows you to avoid slowing down suddenly.
Yes, and they are caused by sudden decelerations which are the result of many factors, including driving too fast for the conditions, roadway, and traffic, and tailgating.
> Slowing down on a busy highway does not reduce turbulence at all,
The only thing that reduces global turbulence reliably on any roadway is reducing speed. All the simulations and real-world implementations show this. It's unambiguous and uncontroversial, except that it requires drivers to slow down, which is politically untenable in many jurisdictions.
It is more dangerous to be slow and have people constantly merging in front of you, rather than be slightly faster and not have all the merging. Accidents happen when vehicles are going different speeds, all things equal.
Obviously it is safer to have longer follow distances, all things equal. But you don't accomplish that if you leave a long follow distance that is cut off a few seconds later by another car trying to get ahead. You end up with a constant stream of cars cutting your follow distance to less than what it would have been if you had just stayed slightly closer to the car in front of you.
We don't live in an ideal world, and having a bunch of cars merging in front of you definitely makes you less safe than having a static situation. I try to make sure I can see through/around the car in front of me, so that I have advance notice of what's happening down the road.
American road laws are insane here. The law should be simple; you must be in the outside lane at all times unless you are overtaking, and once you're done overtaking, you should merge back into the outside lane.
As far as I know that’s the law in every state I’ve driven in, but enforcement is pretty much nonexistent. Some states like Texas or Louisiana might have signs reminding people to stay out of the inner lanes except for passing but I’ve never heard of anyone getting a ticket over it. What’s enforcement like in the UK?
That used to be the case in Ireland too, but confusion due to cultural contamination means pretty much everyone moved to numbering lanes (from the "outside"/"slow"/leftmost lane).
When I did my B license test probably about 30 years ago, the Rules of the Road all referenced inside/outside lanes. When I did my CE license last year, it had been updated to only use lanes 1, 2, 3 etc.
Obviously fast and slow are just colloquial terms.
Why? If everyone followed the rules the lanes would segment into slowest on the right, with gradually increasing speed to the left and people moving between the lanes as needed to overtake. It would be far far far better than the chaos of having to move across all the lanes of traffic all the time because there are random campers driving below the speed limit in every single lane.
First, everyone switches right as soon as there's a gap in a righter lane, so lots of unnecessary switching. Second, the right lane is always full making it hard to merge on or off the highway. Third, the leftmost lanes are underutilized when they could be filled with people who have a long way to go until their offramp.
My decades-long impeccable driving record tends to indicate otherwise. I just don't drive as if I lived in the fantasy land where leaving a long follow distance means I have a lot of room in front of me. It doesn't. It means I get cut off, and the follow distance ends up being shorter than it would have been had I just been following at the same distance as all the other cars on the road.
It is possible of course that the highways you drive are just too busy and the max speed is actually set too high for how busy the road is. That happens more than you'd want because lowering the max of a highway is always an unpopular thing to, even if it's needed.
Still, I tend to find that people underestimate the danger of short distances. Often it's just better to accept a 100 cars going in front of you than to shrug off following someone at 1.5 seconds. It can go well for years because crashes are rare, but when you are in a crash you will be royally screwed when you don't have the reaction distance needed.
This assumes that you can actually maintain a 3 second follow distance. On some roads, you simply cannot, and an attempt to maintain such a distance leads to increased danger from all the cars that cut in.
Simply put: follow distance is not a unilateral decision.
If you actually want the safest option then you should merge all the way right and keep slowing down. Noone is going to merge right if they are trying to go faster, they will only do it to get off the offramp. Meaning the gap will reopen as people exit through the offramp or merge left into faster lanes.
If you choose to go in the fastlane in traffic you should understand that it will have people who do not care about the following distance as much and are just trying to go as fast as possible.
I have found that often times in heavy traffic the rightmost lane can be just as fast or actually faster than a middle or left lane.
> Noone is going to merge right if they are trying to go faster
In my experience even cars that are not trying to go faster will happily merge in front of you unsafely all the time, just because they don't understand the concept of a safe distance.
> If you choose to go in the fastlane in traffic you should understand that it will have people who do not care about the following distance as much and are just trying to go as fast as possible.
It's not about choosing to go in the fast lane. It's about the fact that in heavy traffic, you have no idea which lane will be fastest, because they're all heavy and which one is fastest keeps switching.
> I have found that often times in heavy traffic the rightmost lane can be just as fast or actually faster than a middle or left lane.
That's exactly my point. Which is why you can be in the right lane, and tons of people from the slower lane will try to merge in front of you if you're keeping a safe distance from the car in front.
Your advice is staying in the right lane doesn't apply in these situations.
This is a long thread of people talking past each other. The bottom line is simply this: if you want to drive with a larger-than-average following distance (call it whatever you want, a safety buffer, a "proper" following distance, the point is it is a distance less than the average following distance of the other drivers on the road) then you have to accept that you will not be able to drive at the same speed as the other traffic on the road. It's physically impossible. It can be psychologically frustrating because you see all the cars around you moving at X mph but your self-imposed constraints mean you can only make way at (X minus Y) mph. But them's the breaks, no pun intended
> It can be psychologically frustrating because you see all the cars around you moving at X mph but your self-imposed constraints mean you can only make way at (X minus Y) mph.
This is correct, but I get the sense that people overestimate Y.
Let's say you're driving 60 mph and following the "three second rule" which gives you a ~264 foot safety buffer. A driver then cuts into this safety buffer. Let's assume they like to go fast and enter closer to the front of the buffer so they reduce your safety buffer down to two seconds. In response, you gradually rebuild the safety buffer back to three seconds, costing you an extra second. Soon after you rebuild the safety buffer another car cuts in front of you. Let's say this process repeats every mile of your journey, costing you an extra second every time. This results in you traveling slightly over ~59 mph, making Y = ~1 mph.
Compare that to the lifetime odds of dying in a car crash in the U.S. which is roughly 1 in 100. It's hard to eliminate that entirely, but I'm willing to spend an extra ~1s per car that cuts in front of me to reduce it for myself and my passengers.
Not so. Keeping a constant distance from the car ahead means both cars are moving at the same speed. When a jerk cuts in, after a moment all 3 cars will be moving at the same speed.
We are saying the same thing. When a jerk cuts in, drivers readjust their speed to maintain desired following distance. Net effect, slower speed for all but the lead car
If you personally start with that slower speed to begin with (AKA much longer following distance), you don't have to worry about adjusting down
The fastlane is just another name for the leftmost lane, I am not talking about the one moving fastest.
Again we are not talking about the fastest lane here we are talking about the safest as the OP was concerned about following distance.
> That's exactly my point. Which is why you can be in the right lane, and tons of people from the slower lane will try to merge in front of you
If everyone merged right it would not longer be faster but people do not do this. In the right lane you can slow down as much as you want and never cause an issue so you can always make a gap. In any other lane if you slow down more than traffic you cause issues because people will then try and pass you from the right which is dangerous.
You are placing the burden of your forward following gap on the cars around you but that is a terrible way to drive. You need to be in control of yourself when driving, do not trust that someone is going to follow traffic laws, do not trust that they will go whatever way there turn signal says, do not trust that they will look over there shoulder before merging.
If YOU want a following gap then the only possible safe way to do this is to merge all the way right and slow down whenever someone merges in front of you. There is no other way to do it in heavy traffic. And YES you will have to live with the fact that you will be driving slower than the traffic around you. That's the trade you make if you choose to have a large following gap.
You’re the problem because of the way you are thinking. You don’t own the asphalt in front of you. You’re angry because in your mind you do, and you feel righteous about it. That’s why you are casting a moral judgement about them.
The most efficient throughput of the road system is not for people to “politely” queue up for 5 miles. People should be utilizing the rod and merging in an orderly manner. By adopting some arbitrary self imposed practice that is leading to 20 drivers cutting in front of you, are the one creating an unsafe situation.
Correct, but you _need_ the asphalt in front of you for both safe driving and also to avoid cascading hard braking events. I also don't own the asphalt under me or behind me too, so it's kinda a silly statement tbh.
You do, but if you leave so much that 20 cars are pulling in front of you, you’ve either driving too slow or misjudged and left unnecessary space. At 15-20 mph traffic speeds, you need 8-20 feet. Ideally, cars in a multiple lane to one lane exit scenario should be zipper merging when congestion reduces speeds. Engineers model this behavior and try to design roads to encourage it.
If you do that and get angry when people change lanes in front of you, you have consciously or subconsciously decided you own that 20 foot gap. That reaction impairs judgement and causes accidents.
If 20 people take advantage of your buffer, then you are delayed by a distance of 20 vehicle-lengths + 20 follow-distances. This is about 1000 meters, a distance which you can travel in about 45 seconds. So the net effect of all 20 people merging in front of you is less than a minute delay on your trip. Unless there is an almost constant stream of people merging in front of you, this isn't adding up to more than a percentage point of two of your whole trip.
To be completely clear the conversation is entirely not about zipper merging, but about people who are using safety gaps as opportunities for them to traffic weave attaining a faster than average travel speed at the cost of every one else's average travel speed and safety
Nobody is getting screwed. I've been the person making the gap many many times. You just ignore them, it isn't hard - they are way up there and I'm way back here, plenty of space. I just keep on with my business of safely driving. Sure I often wish I could go the speed limit - but in reality I'm going almost as fast as they are so it isn't like a few feet lost costs me anything. Odds are I'll be stopped at a red light and lose a lot more time once I get off the highway.
Besides, there are only a few people who ever merge in front of me (and then those who don't merge block their lane so nobody else can get in).
In high traffic you’re definitely being screwed - both by the continuing lack of a proper safety gap, and by not being able to go a normal speed. Which does add up in many of these situations.
But I guess we should just all self gaslight to feel better about it?
In Bay Area traffic I’d literally be not moving at all for most of the time if I followed you advice, in heavy traffic. That’s the exact situation I’m talking about.
>> It's frustrating because . . .
> Slow down a bit to create another buffer
> I think if you reflect a bit you'll find
The parent post does return to the psycho-emotional layer of the problem but on the whole the exchange brings to mind the "two movies, one screen" model of perennial problems. In many of the comments here some people emphasize the problem in terms of physics and some see the problem in terms of psychology (both have overlap and are valid).
A third perspective may be "game theory." I think the Prisoner's Dilemma [0] could explain some aspects of the physical/mental problem. In the set below, Driver A's strategy isn't dependent on a singular predictable Driver B but all drivers that may perform the role of Driver B during the course of a commute.
Agent Cooperate Defect
Driver A leaves space doesn't
Driver B^n merge stay
Leaving aside all times in which a Driver B must merge, such as lane ending zippers or merging to approach an exit lane, Driver B merges because there is some advantage to being in the lane of Driver A. If Driver A maintains space they will not just lose to one Driver B but to all Driver Bs.
I conjecture that this is a collective action problem and that above a certain traffic saturation point there must be a social taboo against changing lanes.
This is not to claim that individual perspective shifting is not important. I am reminded of Foster Wallace's Kenyon address "This is Water," [1] quoted below. However, the task of changing individual perspectives is vastly higher energy than the creation of a social taboo, which is why purity codes and other social inhibitors are so prevalent.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us
do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it
doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. [...]
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about
these kinds of situations. [...] [Maybe] the Hummer that just cut me off is
maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat
next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a
bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
No. That happens when people drive too close to each other and brake. Not when you let off the gas slightly to maintain a gap which prevents this exact thing.
The entire reason this happens is because 98% of people are morons who drive up the next guy's ass. If everyone kept a proper distance it wouldn't happen at all.
Might depend on your location, but usually you are legally required to allow a merge. Which makes sense, the system stops working when two lanes that are required to merge, don't merge because people are being petty and entitled.
We're about as close as we have ever been to a holo-deck with VR/AR right now, but it is notable that it is still a fringe technology. I think basically no one cares about space data centres except the rule of cool enthusiasts in the technosphere.
The harsh reality of economics and demand is hitting them. For years, Musk's ideas were funded by an overvalued Tesla stock and stupendous amounts of investor money, and currently it's being double down on with the amount of money being poured into AI and its necessary hardware.
But the demand / economic viability just isn't there. VR is cool but it's not mainstream. "Metaverse" exists and some companies are making good money off of it (Roblox, Fortnite, MMOs, etc), but nobody wanted Facebook's multi-billion-dollar-invested version of it because they just don't get it. I really hope all this nonsense collapses sooner rather than later and we go back to realistic and viable spending.
I have to say, this quip has been putting in a lot of work over the last decade for me: "Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
I am surprised the space casino hasn't been done to be honest. Or some kind of space resort. I guess we are stepping across the stepping stones now, with private space flights, and private space fairing companies. Maybe it is just a matter of time before the Crystal Palace sees its first billionare clients.
> I am surprised the space casino hasn't been done to be honest. Or some kind of space resort.
The ISS is the single most expensive thing built by humankind ($100b+). What makes you think that building a "space casino" or "space resort" is commercially viable?
Without getting into the weeds, I don't think it would be commercially viable, but that doesn't seem to be a prerequisite for funding these days.
I would also note that the ISS is a very expensive long term project, a greenfields space station like Tiangong from my understanding was about a 10th of the cost. One of these billionaires could pay for the whole thing out of pocket.
It wouldn't be that far-fetched I suppose, if some large equipment manufacturer has been lobbying to get DIY and even smaller scale 3D printers and CNC banned, to force small businesses back into the Old World of large equipment sales.
Many small businesses don't need to buy their $100k+ machines anymore, since you can build or buy much more affordable machines in the mid to small ranges.
That is a fun thought experiment, as we wouldn't want to manufacture too far away from earth we may still be within the earth's atmosphere. I wonder what effect dumping greenhouse gases into the very upper levels of the atmosphere would have in comparison to doing it lower down. My assumption is it would eventually sink to a lower density layer, having more or less the same impact.
I somewhat disagree, because at the end of the day he still has to take responsibility for the fuckup and that will matter in terms of dollars and reputation. I think this is also why a lot of roles just won't speed up that much, the bottleneck will be verification of outputs because it is still the human's job on the line.
An on the nose example would be, if your CEO asked you for a report, and you delivered fake data, do you think he would be satisfied with the excuse that AI got it wrong? Customers are going to feel the same way, AI or human, you (the company, the employee) messed up.
> if your CEO asked you for a report, and you delivered fake data, do you think he would be satisfied with the excuse that AI got it wrong?
He was likely the one who ordered the use of the AI. He won't fire you for mistakes in using it because it's a step on the path towards obsoleting your position altogether or replacing you with fungible minimum wage labor to babysit the AI. These mistakes are an investment in that process.
He doesn't have to worry about consequences in the short term because all the other companies are making the same mistakes and customers are accepting the slop labor because they have no choice.
I fail to imagine a single bit of business software that cannot be achieved with open source software, outside of specific proprietary processes. But your average office technology work, I see being very plausible to move to open source. There is definitely going to be a breadth of quality across the tools, but the outputs can all be the same I believe. Even on a personal level, it's worth cultivating self-reliance on tools you control. But at a national scale it feels perhaps existential, worth what learning pains there may be. You also cultivate local software industries.
I think if you reflect a bit you'll find you are being the same kind of person as them, if you are getting angry that you have to slow down and give up space for someone else. I understand some people can be aggressive though, that can be frustrating regardless of the outcome.
reply