this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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Traffic (the book) says most Americans merge into traffic wrong when lanes reduce (from say 3 lanes to 2 lanes for example.)
The right way is waiting until you are at the very end of the lane that's reducing. When that happens up to 60% more cars per hour get through the bottle neck in heavy traffic and accidents resulting in killed or serious injury are reduced by up to 80%.
Bottom line having multiple entry points in a queue with multiple slow down points due to the multiple entry points is the cause of the reduced performance with the way most Americans do it.
Not riding peoples ass and leaving room would make it smoother too.
Agreed! Though the book says multiple studies find people who leave 2 seconds or more are more likely to rear end someone. While the studies didn't identify why it was hypothesized people who most often leave 2 seconds practice distracted driving. I know the last time I was rear ended my rear dash cam clearly showed he has 200+ feet and didn't look up from his phone until right before he hit me.
At driver school we were taught to leave 3-4 seconds of space and not to look at our fucking toys while we drive.
It's a winning combo. Add in some convictions with loads of embarrassing community service and we change the world a dickhead at a time.
It could also be that the impatient people on the road keep cutting them off, leaving them with less than two seconds between them and an ignorant driver who you will have to prove cut you off or you're at fault for the accident. Of course, that doesn't happen if there's no space in front of you for someone to cut in. So there's my hypothesis.
That's a fair point, when driving my wife's EV it has the fancy cruise control that leaves a good sized gap and people are always taking advantage of that.
Thats probably more of a correlation though. Like, the drivers that leave that much space are probably doing so only because they know they arent paying attention. If they were paying attention, a 2s distance would be safer.
Probably