Traffic Wouldn’t Jam If Drivers Behaved Like Ants

I see what you did there.

Ants also cooperate.

Ants share the road only with their own kind.

Ants are blind, mostly.

Ants don't really care if they live or die.

Despite all this, they still collide with each other constantly. If they were the size of cars, these collisions would cause constant injury. They are not an appropriate analogue.

Kind of similar to the traffic in Saigon, Vietnam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKLWZjBu2iQ

It definitely is dangerous, but the video seems to be running at 2x, perhaps to make it seem more dangerous than it is actually. The pedestrians walking around are a give away.

Just to clarify, this video is sped up. But yea, I get the point.

That doesn't actually look noticably crazier than traffic at some times and places in NYC. The main difference is NYC has more traffic lights and human traffic enforcement officers -- but only 4 wheeled vehicles are highly likely to obey those -- pedestrians mostly don't and 2 wheeled vehicles vary, so you can certainly see reminiscent scenes here. I think I might actually prefer to traverse that intersection than say, biking in a hurry from 14th to 57th on 8th ave. during evening rush hour. Most of the conflict looks like just the usual "through traffic versus left turners" which happens anywhere there aren't signals with separate left turn phases

Yet another irrelevant analogue being trumped up as "evidence" of something yet to happen. I'll convert once I see actual vehicles on actual roads.

> Stricter and more expensive ticketing might help.

I doubt it, and… please no. Demerit points maybe. Fines disproportionately punish the less affluent and incentivise the wrong attitude to enforcement.

I would prefer a more general change: studies show that traffic jams and accidents happen more frequently if cars are going at widely different speeds. So the consequence should be not only to ticket drivers who go too fast but also drivers who go too slow. So instead of setting a speed limit we need a speed range and deviation from it in either direction should be punished. Obviously this would only be for freeways and certain highways.

This isn't really pertinent to the article. It's not about "stream smoothing" through more judicious use of gas and break.

Please don't ticket people for driving at a safer speed while next to an accident.

> In the Netherlands and Germany I've seen traffic jams develop due to drivers slowing down to observe an accident on the other lane.

That's nothing out of the ordinary. In the US the behavior is known as "rubbernecking".

>Stricter and more expensive ticketing might help.

I wouldn't hold my breath. After all, you are attempting to change what appears to be fundamental human behaviour, curiosity.

Wouldn't a surprise "lane reduction" due to an accident alone be enough to account for the traffic jam?

Imagine that there's an accident in a single lane. The remaining lanes now have to take in all the other drivers from the accident lane, while these drivers decelerate and attempt to take the remaining lanes at speeds lower than the average speed. Yet single car cutting in line could trigger the deceleration of the entire remaining lane (like in "traffic wave" models). The cars in this lane then try to cut into another lane, and so on, such that the whole traffic is impaired. And this keeps going on for every cohort of cars reaching the accident area, producing the traffic jam.

This is my intuition of it, at least.

To be clear, I'm talking about highways with a solid divider and no way to change lanes except taking an exit. Also, I've been in one such jam in the Netherlands where everybody drives at a consistent 130 km/h max.

Reading the responses here, autonomous vehicles going in a coordinated fashion might be the only viable solution.

Or in cooler terminology, the circle of death. It can also happen with sheep and larger herd animals, although they're at least smart enough to (usually) stop and take a break when they get tired.

Ants do things that are bad for the individual but good for the colony; drivers are selfish.