The utility of switching lanes when stuck in traffic
blogs.reuters.com
blogs.reuters.com
Let's say you have to drive 100 km. Half of the distance your lane moves at 100 km/h, and the other half your lane creeps along at 10 km/h.
So you'll spend 50 / 100 + 50 / 10 = 5.5 hours in the car, at an average speed of 18.18 km/h.
For every one minute you spend passing other cars, you'll spend 10 minutes watching other cars whiz by you!
Even though the fast and slow distances are evenly distributed, all drivers perceive that they're in the wrong lane.
Sometimes I pick a car in the next lane to track and compare my progress with. Although one of us will sometimes leave the other behind for a few minutes, usually we return to rough parity eventually.
Here is a suggestion for those of you who are currently like this guy but are willing to try driving smart for a change: Don't alternate days. Get into one lane and stay there and continue to do so for a couple of weeks. Listen to the radio. Think about stuff you need to think about. Zen the #$%^ out. Once you unlearn your moron-driver habits you'll arrive at your destination a lot less stressed out and you'll have the peace of mind that you're not one of the morons adding to the problem.
That he thinks it is ok to cut through residential neighbourhoods because the freeway is backed up is more than stupid, really. It is dangerous and unfair. I was going to say that, given the apologetics around this strategy, that he's being a little tongue-in-cheek. But when he opened with "the really painful part of being stuck in traffic is not, really, the actual amount of time that it takes to get from Point A to Point B" it was pretty clear that we were going to be looking for wisdom and intelligence from other sources.
So rather than sit bumper-to-bumper, I will open a car-sized space ahead of me, and intentionally allow "line jumper" cars to enter it. Rather than alternately hitting the gas and brake, I'll just let my car roll, smoothing out the wavelike interactions in congested traffic.
If you stop thinking purely of your own self-interest, you can act to improve the overall flow of traffic, rather than just try to get yourself out of it as soon as possible. Think of it as an engineering problem. Instead of how to get 1 person home as quickly as possible, try to get 10000 cars to their destinations with the lowest median travel time, using only your ability to control one car in the flow of traffic.
When you are fully alert, it leads to frustration , lane jumping and road rage. So I agree with GP that you need to mellow yourself down during long stop-n-go traffic. Not to the point of falling asleep on the wheel of course. But I don't think everyone needs to be combat ready either.
I can't wait for driverless cars. We are the ones who make traffic much worse because we have to have our own way.
As a bonus, I get to feel superior to everyone not employing this strategy.
I'm a middle of the road kind of driver. Almost an equal number of people pass me (sometimes at crazy speeds) as I pass myself. My dad is a slow and steady type (and also feels superior about it), so I get to hear all his "stories" about how so and so passed him and sped up fast but hit every light just like he did, but he wasted less gas (or some other reasoning). However, he conveniently doesn't note the likely five other times in the same scenario where the guy hit every light and left my dad in the dust.
Personally, I notice people I pass a lot because of my dad's comments, and am very self conscious of when I pass somebody but get nowhere. However, most of the time, I passed that person because they were just driving too slow (I'll not slow down and go 5 mph under the speed limit just to make some random person happy), and even if they are going the speed limit, if they drive inconsistently (hit the brakes, slow down/speed up randomly, etc), I just want to be away from them and somewhere safer/less stressful to drive.
I use cruise control a LOT, so I'm annoyed at having to hit my brakes for no reason other than some stranger's whim.
Sometimes we aren't jockeying for position, we are just getting away from somebody.
Also, the less stress there is on the road the better, IMO.
Unless the field is heavily regulated, I imagine that car manufacturers are going to tune and market their cars according to their existing brand identities: safety, economy, performance, "thrill", and so forth.
It'd definitely be an improvement, but I also think it'll take decades to work out the kinks.
I tell this story all the time to help clients understand that customer perception is more important than reality:
"SOME years ago, executives at a Houston airport faced a troubling customer-relations issue. Passengers were lodging an inordinate number of complaints about the long waits at baggage claim. In response, the executives increased the number of baggage handlers working that shift. The plan worked: the average wait fell to eight minutes, well within industry benchmarks. But the complaints persisted.
Puzzled, the airport executives undertook a more careful, on-site analysis. They found that it took passengers a minute to walk from their arrival gates to baggage claim and seven more minutes to get their bags. Roughly 88 percent of their time, in other words, was spent standing around waiting for their bags.
So the airport decided on a new approach: instead of reducing wait times, it moved the arrival gates away from the main terminal and routed bags to the outermost carousel. Passengers now had to walk six times longer to get their bags. Complaints dropped to near zero."
"Sasser (et al) provide good examples of both managing the perception and the expectation of waiting times. For the former, they offer the example of ‘the well-known hotel group that received complaints from guests about excessive waiting times for elevators. After an analysis of how elevator service might be improved, it was suggested that mirrors be installed near where guests waited for elevators. The natural tendency of people to check their personal appearance substantially reduced complaints, although the actual wait for the elevators was unchanged. "
It speaks to the fact that perception of moving faster does not match reality.
We have the worst kind of lane switchers. Here, they often jump into the short lane on the right, which is reserved for cars entering and exiting the road, to cheat back in. This is a real problem, because they slow down traffic even more when they have to force their way back in.
I am of the opinion that lane switchers have very low impact on traffic speed, whereas people who gun the engine and slam on their brakes are most directly responsible for slowdowns.
Of course, this presumes that the lane switcher does not switch in a manner that causes someone to slam on his brakes.
Thus, if my theory is correct, attempting to smooth out the longitudinal speed waves should take priority over transversely vibrating cars that could potentially exploit that strategy to move faster than the rest of traffic, at the expense of everyone else.
I'd love to see some work done to figure this out.
Regardless, for me the best strategy is to almost never switch lanes. Even when I do switch, 15 minutes later I see somebody that I had passed earlier zipping by me in another lane. There is no value in switching for me that I can determine, and my commute is much more pleasant when I stop thinking about how to get one car length ahead. Whether the lane switchers improve efficiency or reduce it doesn't change that equation for me.
I said 'almost never'. There are a few places on my commute where free lanes are predictable - everyone is merging right to try to get to get onto some interchange, that so several lanes back up, while the people who are trying to stay on the same road can move left and travel quickly. But even then, what are you optimizing for? Maybe 15seconds? Sure, it is more than that in the moment, as you can sit in the slow lanes for a few minutes, but all you do if you move left is rush ahead to the next back up.
[1] http://plus.maths.org/content/cars-next-lane-really-do-go-fa...
Seems to work better than sticking with a lane. Probably just the placebo effect, but I'll take it.
> In other words, if you want to understand utility functions, don’t talk to an economist.
It seems like talking to an economist works pretty well here.
If I am executing a poor strategy that doesn't actually help me get my job done any better, I shouldn't be happy about it. Especially if I know what I am doing is ineffective.
If you know that the stay the lane strategy that you are executing is optimal and that the lane switching doesn't help, then you should just stop being so frustrated. The high intensity switching won't get you there faster. Accept it, move on.
I liked my nexus 7 tablet a lot. One day I dropped it, the screen was smashed, and it was useless. I was a tiny bit sad (essentially, I lost $200), but then I just went an ordered another and moved on. Because I knew about the sunk cost fallacy, I could just unemotionally do what was optimal.
This is also why utilitarianism in ethics is ridiculous.
I've noticed this tends to not matter so much if you're not the one driving, more so if you're in the backseat. Self-drive cars anyone?
Self-driving cars are great because for the first time, you have a machine that commutes for you. There's no competition to get in the car, no competition to sit down in the car, and once the car starts moving, you don't have to care about how the car navigates the competition on the road.
It's true that on the large scale, it's less efficient than public transportation, but on an individual level, it's the best option.
I disagree. The stress from driving doesn't come just from navigating a crowded space. It comes from the potential consequences of making mistakes. If I bump into someone walking on foot, it's no problem. Once I'm on a bus/train/etc. you have your own space. Granted, it might not be a lot of space, and sometimes it might be uncomfortable, but it's hardly stressful.
Bumping into another car when driving is a completely different beast. Now I need to deal with insurance companies, and it might cost me a lot of money. Or I hit something inanimate and I'm still doing a lot of damage to my car. That's where the stress comes from.
Driving brings with it challenges. Strategy, skill, timing, spacial recognition, etc. It also brings with it a pure feeling of freedom. I believe driving is under-appreciated and that leads to the terrible driving habits exhibited daily. Those who dont care, those who arent even driving but day dreaming, doing makeup, reading, using the phone, etc. It is under-appreciation coupled with lack of respect for being in control of a 2000LB+ piece of metal and fuel that can make driving seem like a chore rather than a joy.
Having tested this by noting the positions of large distinct trucks that I can see form a distance, I've noticed that I do get through the jam faster this way.
I'm not sure whether my reasoning convinces my wife, or she just finds the left-hand turns inconvenient.
But if you drive the same route every day, it is possible to find inflection points in the traffic patterns, where you want to go one way and a significant portion of the traffic wants to go another. Optimizing around these points is a good reason to change lanes.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/friday-night-mus...
with a followup here:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/life-in-the-slow...