SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday December 18 2017, @03:17AM
Drive Zen. I like it. I tend to think of it more in terms of Tao - on the road or otherwise I try to contribute to "psoitive flow. Or a phrase from some novel that I really liked: an easing of the way.
I don't know that I'm qualified to have an opinion on efficient merging - seems like the sort of thing that you'd need to to rigorous experiments on to be able to talk about anything but your own preconceptions.
That said - you sound like my kind of asshole. When efficiency is dubious (even when it isn't, really), fairness seems like a good goal to pursue. One of my own favorite examples of benevolent assholery is one of those truck snarls. Waited patiently in line until it was my turn to start passing the truck on the right - and then just didn't. Hung out at his rear bumper as traffic piled up behind me feeling all those glares trying to burn a hole in the back of my head until everyone in front of me cleared the truck, and then fell back just enough so he could get over and flashed my lights to let him know it was clear.
Swear I had more than a few singed hairs from all the glares, but my reward was watching what had been a rapidly growing traffic snarl dissolve back to smooth flow before the truck vanished in my rear-view mirror.