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Comment by logn | Hacker News Reader

I often try the technique of leaving lots of space and going at a slower, steady pace. One problem is that everyone re-routes around you, and you induce road rage and traffic weaving. The other problem is that unless it's a straight stretch of road, you have no idea what speed is slow enough.

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Truckers (professional drivers) do this all the time.

If ever there is a traffic jam on the highway, you will see the big rigs consistently leaving hundreds of feet of space in front of them.

They also seem to concentrate in the center lanes of the highway for reasons I haven't figured out yet.

> They also seem to concentrate in the center lanes of the highway for reasons I haven't figured out yet.

Most likely because if a lane is closed it will be an edge lane. Also, if you're on a 3 lane road and two lanes are closed, you only have to make one lane change to keep going.

Semi-trucks are generally not allowed in the left lane on the freeway, and the right must be a nightmare of merging for semi-trucks in traffic.

Not to mention that if the right lane is an "exit only" lane, merging a truck over a lane is pretty hard. No one wants to leave enough room. Or when you do leave enough room, some idiot sees that giant opening and moves into it.

In a traffic jam, wouldn't the alternative to leaving plenty of space be constantly starting and stopping? That seems pretty like a lot of work for the driver in a big rig.

ding ding ding ding! We have a winner. The just leave it in the fastest gear that is slow enough to not hit the car in front of them. For the extra 5min it costs it's a lot easier than pushing a bazillion pound clutch twice per cycle.

Yep! I've only ever driven manual transmission cars, and my dad taught me that early on. "Just leave it in first and idle along." Even in a very driver-friendly manual car, stop and go traffic can be brutal.

Offtopic:

> ding ding ding ding! We have a winner.

I cannot speak for others, but, at least to me, this reads as extremely condescending: it makes it sound like other commenters are basically picking arguments at random and you are the only one to know the truth.

Semi trucks aren't trying to calm traffic, they are maintaining a consistent speed (or rather engine RPM) and gear for fuel efficiency. Drivers are paid per mile and the further they can go on a single fill-up is more money in their pocket.

Edit to add: It is a computer telling them how fast to go, usually something similar to http://www.scangauge.com/

>Drivers are paid per mile

That doesn't seem to be the majority here.

A game I used to play with myself on the highway was to simply try and use my brakes as little as possible - when you see brake lights ahead it's instinctual to also brake yourself, but often if you have a long enough follow distance you can just lift off the gas.

Brake lights being a binary representation of an analogue pedal is another problem, although iirc on some newer cars the lights are brighter/more lights go on the harder you brake

IMO if you have to brake on the freeway, someone made an error.

Cool about brake lights; I've wondered for years why they don't do this. I knew about some newer cars flashing the hazard lights in a very hard stop, but didn't know any were doing brake light meters. Any idea which specific models? I'd love if they standardized the messaging across brands and countries; imagine a new mustang where 1 vertical bar on each side means light braking, 2 means moderate, and 3 + rapid flashing means very hard braking. Not sure what standard would make the most sense for this, but the sooner, the better, so new cars can adopt it. It's way less useful / less clear when each car does it differently.

I used to ride a motorcycle every day from the suburbs to Chicago's loop (until a crash on the way to work. heh) and I'm not sure that I'd want something like this. As binary as it initially seems, there's actually a lot more contextual information to it than you'd think. The swerviness, the length of the brake, how straight their car's going, how often they do it, head position, how in depth their conversations seem to be, etc. Like a lot of riders out there, I started playing mini games to try and figure out what the drivers were doing to help with determining risk. For me, imagining the physical position of their driving limbs, as weird as that may sound, was the most help. Thinking the problem in those terms helped out and really pushed the idea that if their foot is hovering over the brake, then a lot of caution is needed. I don't do this as much in a car, and I doubt many drivers do this, or anything close to it.

I think that if something like this was implemented, then a lot of people would use it as a crutch and make poor decisions based on implied safety eg, "His light didn't blink three times, so I didn't think to stop." That, and a lot of new cars, for some stupid reason, seem to want to obfuscate the significance of brake lights by just having them be brighter versions of on-by-default lights anyway or similar.

There definitely is something along those lines that'd be helpful, but I think it might have to be all or nothing there. Flooding phone frequencies with white noise might work, though ;)

New Jersey transit buses do something similar. For light braking the amber lights come on, for harder braking the actual brakes lights do.

I want to say it was first introduced by either BMW or Mercedes.

I've seen Porsche races on TV where you can see a strobing effect, although LEDs sometimes look strange on video

use my brakes as little as possible

I play this 'game' all the time, everywhere, and when it's time to slow down more than what simply releasing the pedal does I'll first try to shift down and have the engine brake for me. The latter not only because it lowers fuel usage but also because it makes me keep even more distance, which is the key point for me. It is just so much safer (hitting another car because you cannot brake in time isone of the most common accident types) and leads to much more relaxed driving without fast acceleration/deceleration. Only disadvantage so far: other drivers not understanding it and passing you in anger.

Still, instead of wearing out the cheap & quick to replace break pads, you wear out your transmission.

If you are shifting correctly that is not the case. The "breaking" is achieved by the engine, the wear on the transmission is the same as when you are stepping on the gas.

It also cause pressure waves in the exhaust system since you're using the vacuum forming in the engine to slow you down, which is more noticable at low rpms due to the slowing of the positive exhaust pressure changing to intake vacuum frequency. Going from acceleration to engine braking at low rpms, such as in traffic jams, has caused a weaken seam in my exhaust system to break.

Actually it's easier to manage speed and spacing in congestion with a gently curving stretch of road - cars further up are visible so you can anticipate better and slow down earlier/more gradually, reducing jerk. This way too, you won't seem slow to the people behind you. It's not so much going super slow as it is being able to correctly guess the average speed of the road and acting as a damper. This is basically what the article describes btw.

I also like to try and impose a rule of not touching the brakes unless absolutely necessary, and using 20% throttle input at most, that helps with the whole dampening thing.

One last caveat: these techniques only really work for freeways/highways in the developed world. The tragedy of the commons phenomenon is on a whole nother level in places like India or China (se asia in general) or a lot of Latin America or even sixth avenue.

> I also like to try and impose a rule of not touching the brakes unless absolutely necessary, and using 20% throttle input at most, that helps with the whole dampening thing.

I do the same. It's funny the frustration this seems to cause other people. Frustration from nothing, if they'd think about it.

"But I want to go fasterrrr! Why doesn't he goooooooo?!?!?" One time, a man and a lady in a Harley Davidson edition F150 got so mad at my for doing this that they were both screaming at me through my open sunroof, threatening to get out and physically assault me etc. They kept yelling at me to "learn how to drive". It as grid-lock traffic and we'd have minutes at a time of complete stoppage. That was a pretty awkward hour of my life.

Yeah I've had that a couple times. Once was a honk (I can only assume was) because I wasn't tailgating--yet we were moving at the same speed, so the driver swerved from behind me to the side and then in front--then slammed on their brakes.

The other time was after cruising during a lot of short stop and go intervals (so it was easy to judge crawling speed, that is to say). I eventually switched to the lane I needed and the guy who was rubberbanding behind me the entire way (pretty much going 1-10-1mph constantly instead of just sitting at 3 like me) pulled next to me and shook his head. I had a good feeling why, so I rolled down my window as we came to a stop next to each other at a light and asked if there was a problem. He said, "You drive like a dumb ass". "Oh, I do? Please tell me what I was doing wrong so I can improve". "You just drive like a dumbass". "No really, you seem like you know a lot about driving, please enlighten me". And he rolled up his window, the light turned green but he accelerated before the car in front of him had a chance to go (perhaps to get away from me, I'm 6'2" and 250lbs.), and then slammed on his brakes again...

Dunning-Kruger, if you ask me.

The other problem is that this isn't scalable. Imagine a traffic jam that stretches for miles. Now imagine that same jam where everyone has left an extra three car lengths in front of them. You're suddenly using a lot more road per car. Tailgating actually seems like the most efficient use of space to me, provided you tailgate effectively (don't yo-yo).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave

Tailgating is often the _cause_ of the jam.

That really isn't the case in high traffic areas: http://jliszka.github.io/2013/10/01/how-traffic-actually-wor...

The jam might not necessarily occur in the first place if Everyone leaves three car lengths in front of them while in motion. Packing together at super slow or standstill traffic is okay. The goal is that traffic continues to flow at a reasonable pace; space between cars doesn't necessarily matter when determining how long it takes to get from point A to point B.

You're proposing changing the traffic pattern to look like a liquid instead of a gas. Guess which state has a higher viscosity?

If we all computerized cars that introduced 0 stochastic motion, this might work. But if one deer gets a dumb idea you're going to have a multi-kilometer pileup.

>liquid instead of a gas

I'd never have thought of it this way, but it's so simple. Thanks.

Not only is tailgating unsafe, but it's not possible to do it effectively. Even if you are a super-skilled racing driver, the driver ahead of you isn't, and he will slam on his brakes at the last second, forcing you to do the same, forcing the car behind you to do the same...rinse and repeat. Or you will hit him, or the car behind will hit you, etc, causing another accident and another traffic jam.

That's how the traffic jam happens in the first place. An accident happens, closing a lane, but the impatient people in that lane don't merge until the last second, forcing the people in the next lane to slow down quickly. Some people in the next lane don't leave room for cars to merge, forcing them to merge later, forcing them to do so at a slower speed, slowing down all the cars behind them in a cascading wave of brake lights.

What you're imagining might be possible with cooperative, AI-driven convoys of cars...until a black hat breaks in to their software over the Internet and makes them crash.[1]

What helps is to provide a buffer in your lane by moving at a consistent speed, avoiding braking altogether. Of course idiots are going to get mad and zoom around you once in a while, and that's fine, because they will clear space behind the wave, allowing traffic behind to move more smoothly.

The bottom line is that you can't control what other drivers do, and many drivers are stupid. You can control what you do, leaving more space, maintaining safe following distance, leaving room for cars to merge easily ahead of you, increasing your gas mileage by not braking, etc.

1: http://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-high...

...or, according to what you say, being one of those idiots that are going to get made and zoom around once in a while.

Either way, this makes me think that a model where cars that are okay with driving slowly spreading around but leaving plenty of space in front of them. Similar to how (in California at least) motorcycles can filter filter though the traffic, cars that are impatient can use the large spacing between the slow moving cars to move forward.

> One problem is that everyone re-routes around you, and you induce road rage and traffic weaving

Probably a good indicator you are going too slow.

Which is okay, just please, please, PLEASE stay in the right lane.

> Probably a good indicator you are going too slow. Which is okay, just please, please, PLEASE stay in the right lane.

Not necessarily. It dense, slow traffic, short-sighted drivers see open spaces; they rush for it, then slam on their brakes. It's amusing the frustration that this generates--for no real reason other than "I'm mad and going to tailgate you because you aren't tailgating the person in front of you".

If people swoop in front of me, Oh well. It's a pittance on my overall commute time, if effecting it at all. Generally it's just limited two a few very aggressive drivers, and I'd rather they tailgate the person in front of me rather than me.

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