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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @10:14PM (5 children)
There. FTFY.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @11:05PM (3 children)
You take your pokey little apartment, polluted air, and feeling of righteousness, and I'll take my 10 hectares of combined gardens and stock paddocks, with my own water and dare I say food supplies, within 40 minutes drive of a city center (or 1.5 hours if I felt like suffering the ever so efficient public transport system).
I must admit, it is difficult - I am a good solid 6 minutes drive to the nearest supermarket, and a reasonable mall is a few minutes further, but I can nearly manage that suffering.
It is difficult sleeping at night, with all that damn silence, and the temptation to go outside and look at the clear stars and moon can be annoying, I guess.
Mind you, in the summer with the windows open, we can hear a few animal noises, and the occasional distant vehicle, sometimes.
it is a bit annoying during summer, what with all the excess fresh fruit on the trees.
Thinking about it, I am *so* jealous of your nirvana, can I please come and join the rat-race? please?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @01:40AM (1 child)
I did see a rat tonight, even in the cold and snow. And I thought to myself, "shouldn't those kind, caring PETA folks take this poor rat in to their homes so it isn't harmed? In fact, perhaps that's where *all* the rats should go."
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:13AM
I think you should do some real research on what PETA is exactly about! In fact I'm 100% convinced that PETA was just set up as an experiment to test what has become the current liberal platform. See PETA believes that Humans owning animals is WRONG. They also believe that animals who were tamed by people should be KILLED to end their suffering because they can never return to the natural state of being an animal.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday December 18 2017, @05:57PM
Your place sounds nice. I hope your yield is plentiful enough that the parcel serves you, rather than you serving the parcel. Where I grew up farmers did well, but over the divide they struggled and had to live very close to the bone.
It is good, too, to have solitude if you don't care for crowds and don't crave the intellectual foment of cultural exchange.
Having grown up in the country, in the Rockies, and now having lived in NYC and other cities for 20 years, I'd say some of what you wrote is somewhat true, but not to the degree you think. A couple things are not really true at all.
Apartments can be small if you live alone. If you have a family you're going to have more or less the same space that most people in the country have. You will likely not have a yard, which can be a drawback, but then you also don't have to mow the lawn, trim the hedges, rake the leaves, or shovel snow. If the roof develops a leak, or the heat doesn't go on, it's someone else's job to fix it.
Air quality in the age of the internal combustion engine is not great. ICEs, however, are ubiquitous now. You really have to go out of your way to escape exhaust. Then, if you do go far enough to get away from exhaust you might have gone into woodland that gets nice and smokey during forest fire season.
Light pollution is similar, too. Even in the inter-mountain West it can be almost impossible to get a pristine sky. A few years ago we went camping in the Yogo and you could still see the orange glow coming from the direction of Choteau (I think it was).
You drive 6 minutes to the supermarket. You have to get in your car, scrape the windshield free of ice and snow, dig out the driveway, deal with idiots on the road, negotiate a parking lot full of people who seem to love taking their sweet time when you're waiting for their spot, then walk the endless aisles of Walmart, wait in line at the register, make fake small talk, then haul everything out to the car, load up, do the drive back, then unload everything and put it away before the shopping is done. All the time to do that must be reckoned part of your shopping experience. I can go online, hit "buy" if they're items I've bought before, and it gets delivered to my apartment by a guy who carries it all up the stairs to my front door. If I actually want to go to the store, I can walk 3 minutes in any direction to a regular grocery store, an Asian market, a Middle-Eastern market, or walk an extra 2 minutes to get to a fancy supermarket like Whole Foods or Fairway. Those will deliver to my door, too. As such, the sum of hassle for me is less than for you, plus I have a great deal more selection.
I can go to malls, too, if I want to, but there's not much reason to. Boutiques with every variety of store malls have are around the corner from my apartment, plus many more that have never been in malls. I also have bulk material suppliers for leather, shoe repair supplies, glassware, metal shops, second-hand furniture, fabric, and anything you can imagine within walking distance. If I want to pick fresh fruit from a tree, in the sense you mean it, I can drive one and a half hours up the Hudson valley or out to New Jersey to pick apples, pears, pumpkins, strawberries, or any kind of produce you can imagine. If I don't mind walking 5 minutes up the hill to Prospect Park and braving the perplexed looks from New Yorkers I can pick fresh mulberries, cherries, raspberries, salmon berries, hawthorne berries, or walnuts off the trees and bushes there.
All that said, I wouldn't call it nirvana. It's a kind of place that has advantages, and drawbacks. Rural places also have advantages, and drawbacks. Righteousness is not the province of one or the other necessarily, either. Some people who live in the city look down their nose at those who don't, and some, like you, who live in the country, look down their nose at those who live in the city.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday December 18 2017, @05:23PM
? The Northern State Parkway is one of three major east-west axes that run the length of Long Island. The Southern State Parkway people take to JFK International Airport is another that serves the South Shore, and the Long Island Expressway mentioned by the parent is another.
There was nothing in what I wrote that insults rural places or exalts cities.
Washington DC delenda est.