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posted by Fnord666 on Friday December 15 2017, @07:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the automate-that-already dept.

Gotta keep 'em separated:

When unexplained traffic jams happen, says an MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) study, you can probably blame tailgaters. The researchers say that if drivers kept an even distance between cars rather than driving too close to the vehicle in front, traffic flow would remain even. This "bilateral control," could double the speed of the average vehicle on busy highways.
...
This ideal is very different from what is the norm in most thinking about traffic, especially by those stuck in it. Drivers (and, consequently, vehicle control systems) tend to be looking ever forward, responding only to what's ahead and largely ignoring what's behind. Thus, in stop-and-go or slow-and-go situations (traffic jams), each vehicle reacts to the vehicle in front, causing intermittent slowdowns or stops (jams) in wave-like patterns. When vehicles are working to maintain equal distances both from the car in front and the vehicle behind, the MIT paper contends, these wave patterns are minimized and traffic flows more smoothly.

Maintaining even spacing facilitates lane changes and merges as well.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Friday December 15 2017, @09:04PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday December 15 2017, @09:04PM (#610463)

    Not true, at least of all automatic drivers. Avoiding unnecessary speed changes and full stops is good for fuel economy on any car, so if you have that mindset, you're going to drive that way regardless of the transmission.

    But casting herky-jerky driving as being unique to auto drivers is unfair. For every auto driver that drives like that, I can find a proportionate number (as manual drivers are a small fraction of the population) of manual drivers who also drive erratically. It's just that the erratic manual drivers tend to be young men who think they're Speed Racer, and they're sure as hell not driving for efficiency either, and yes, they usually do tailgate a lot too, worse than the auto drivers, plus they usually drive recklessly in many other ways.

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