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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.
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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.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Friday December 15 2017, @09:48PM (4 children)
In Italy, cars will move over to let an overtaking car rough - both the car being overtaken, *and* the cars going the other way.
In Australia, the car being overtaken speeds up, and the cars on the other side drive *towards* the car overtaking, in some weird, almost suicidal game of chicken.
Culture?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @10:18PM (1 child)
You're mistaken. In Italy, they're moving over onto the sidewalk to overtake the guy in front of *them*.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Friday December 15 2017, @10:39PM
And the pedestrians, and everyone else, moves over, lets them back in, and keeps doing what they were doing.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday December 15 2017, @10:18PM
Culture it is.
In Russia it is customary to say thank you to a car that slowed or moved over by blinking emergency stop lights one or two times.
In Boston it is customary to play drunk to change lines in traffic.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Saturday December 16 2017, @06:15AM
Are you sure it's not Australia, but California where people drive like that?
When life isn't going right, go left.