181–186 of 186 posts
What do you mean by a ton of space?. What do you mean by 'not much'?"
The real question we should try to answer is "What is the optimum distance all cars should try to keep between them? And that can't be answered qualitatively, only quantitatively.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its a legal lane to no where. By using it you're then relying on the good graces of one of those chumps you just passed. They don't need to let you back in. They're in the legal lane to somewhere, you just got no where really quickly.
You don't have to let me in. I am sure someone in front of you will. Then you have the right to throw a little hissy-fit because of having to live with the repercussions of your poor life decisions.
I catch public transport to work. Mostly because I'd rather have a nap on the way to and from work than deal with wankers like you.
This article is so horribly incorrect and fails right at the very beginning with the wrong assumptions and a idea that isn't thought through. What the author forgot is to take by far the most important variable into account: SPEED So let's quote the author: "The important fact: there is a limit to the number of cars that can pass by a given point on the highway in a given amount of time, and that limit is one car eve…
Having smoother traffic is good on many grounds: happier drivers, better fuel efficiency, and what not. But it does not make people go home faster. Let's put a simple deductive thinking practice: If you are the first car in the jam, you are stopped and slowed by traffic lights, police, accidents or whatever, but the traffic jam does not affect you, you are going as fast as you can. For the second car, you will not ge…
You are describing a particular greedy algorithm wherein each individual car gets home as fast as they can. 1) Car #1 gets home as quick as they can by following closely. 2) Car #2 gets home as quick as they can by following closely, given #1. 3) Car #3 gets home as quick as they can by following closely, given #1+#2. ... Yes, given 1..N, the course of action which minimizes your own time is to follow closely. I agree. And people will probably act that way.
But that doesn't make it an optimal solution. Consider that car #1 introduces several seconds of delay due to braking and acceleration. Then car #2 does. Then car #3. By the end, you've got hours of delay built-in.
Optimal is obviously hard to define. But most people would agree that it's not every driver maximizing their personal interests to a globally shitty end. Everyone following closely is the prisoner's dilemma where both betray each other.
Consider the following alternate thought experiment. Flow of traffic is very much non-linear. That's what stop and go does -- it introduces cascading delay where there was none. Suppose roads are just 10-15% over capacity, and it results in a global average commute time of 1h instead of 45 minutes. This is not unrealistic. What if every day, 20% of drivers leave 1h later, thus preventing stop and go and keeping commutes to 45 minutes. Even if you counted their extra hour as commute time, the average is still less 1h.
I'm not saying this is a good idea (though strategies like this have been used in some cities). I'm just saying that are ways to get everyone home faster than everyone maximizing self-interest [co-operative self-driving cars please!].
This article is so horribly incorrect and fails right at the very beginning with the wrong assumptions and a idea that isn't thought through. What the author forgot is to take by far the most important variable into account: SPEED So let's quote the author: "The important fact: there is a limit to the number of cars that can pass by a given point on the highway in a given amount of time, and that limit is one car eve…
> You can see on the right side how his "cars per second" is _exactly the same_ than on the left side. Is it my browser, or is this completely wrong? For me, the right side moves about double the amount of cars into the upper edge of the image. And I believe that this is the point of the section — it wouldn’t make any sense otherwise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about velocity it's about rate of cars through a point per hour. If you have a mergepoint with 10 lanes. Each lane can support say 20 cars per minute. If you have 200 cars approaching the merge-point per minute the cars can travel effectively at the speed of their choice. If you close one lane, reducing the capacity of the mergepoint to 180 cars per minute while 200 cars are approaching a queue will build. T…
Indeed. The more interesting points to be discussed are 1. If the flow rate changes with speed, thus merging at 5 mph instead of 50 is bad. 2. What will prevent accidents. I suggest start-stop traffic causes more accidents than free flow. 3. Fuel efficiency, which would depend on many things, eg the percentage of cars in traffic that stop their engines when the car is stopped.
So if the car is travelling at .5 carlengths per second then the duration per car should be 4 seconds whereas if the car was travelling at 10 carlengths per second the duration per car should be only 2.1 seconds.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
aww hell no. I'd be terrified of merging into that lane with no highway divider between me and oncoming traffic. Small two lane highways are bad enough! :P
Most of the time, there's an empty lane as a separator. When it is used, they don't allow motorbikes in it just in case, but it's really no worse than a two-lane undivided road. It's also not necessary for you to use that lane if you don't want to -- it doesn't go anywhere special :).