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Comment by taberiand | Hacker News Reader

There's a certain satisfaction in anticipating these stop and go waves while driving, and timing it so that you catch the tail just as it starts moving again - the goal being to use the brake as little as possible and ideally only need to adjust acceleration. I don't really get why people feel the need to repeatedly accelerate up and then slam on the brakes, when leaving reasonable gaps makes everything go smoother.

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> VI don't really get why people feel the need to repeatedly accelerate up and then slam on the brakes, when leaving reasonable gaps makes everything go smoother.

My feeling observing some drivers: because they feel like if they leave a gap of more than 110% of a width of an average car (which is way below reasonable, not to mention safe), some idiot will immediately slot themselves into that gap. Which shouldn't even matter to them, but somehow they prefer to not leave a gap than to risk another take it.

depends on the distance between stoplights. but, in general, this will reduce throughput- if you’re the lead car and you accelerate slowly when it turns green then the 10th car may not get through the light. and if you slow down early and gently, that’ll ripple backward. slowing down gently also doesn’t let the cars pack densely quickly and here again you can’t get enough cars in the space between lights, especially over freeways/bridges. sometimes you’ll see zipper merges just to combat this low density as cars accelerate.

Yeah it's not a technique intended for gridlock city traffic where you need cars to squeeze through a light and then pack together. It's very good for some other scenarios though. I think the sorts of people who put enough thought into driving to delete traffic waves are also aware enough to know when it's not appropriate to use that technique.

I'm talking about highway driving. At traffic lights the behaviour I see is people stacking up in one lane when there's a zipper merge across the intersection - I don't get this either, but it's good for me because there's plenty of room to skip past that line and merge in while the stack dawdles across the road, the inchworm-style traffic movement leaving plenty of space between each car

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