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How is clumping indicative of bad driving?
Unnecessary clumps are bad. They make merging and passing harder, desensitize you to nearby cars' presence, cause night vision problems, etc. A good driver will first notice they are in an unnecessary clump, and a bad driver probably won't. A good driver will try to minimize the the time they spend relatively motionless to other cars (other than behind them at a safe follow distance). A bad driver either doesn't real…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Left lanes are for passing. If you are in the left lane and not passing, guess what.
I agree that clumps usually end up blocking passing lanes, but they're also bad when in any lane(s).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that clumps usually end up blocking passing lanes, but they're also bad when in any lane(s).
A clump == blocking the passing lane. They are definitionally the same.
Crowds of a high enough density push people in orbital waves, with both clockwise and counterclockwise oscillations pulsing at 18 second intervals through the crowd. Monitoring these motions in realtime is possible and may help prevent crowd crush events. Also: At high densities crowds act like sticky springs, with the ground adding the sticky. 18 seconds before the next wave of people crushes you. 18 seconds to get…
I noticed a similar phenomenon while driving on the highway. Vehicles on the other side of the road seem to group up and travel in clusters. Like traffic naturally oscillates into these packets?
What I see every time I drive it is a new clumping behavior that emerges: some big rigs tend to drive quite slow but do that thing where they want to pass someone going 54 and they are going 55 so it takes ages and the traffic in the left lane gets longer and longer, leaving a gap in the right lane.
At thing point, some drivers say "fuck it" and zip down the right lane and aggressively merge back in to shorten their wait getting around the blockage. As you are likely driving this route for hours (SF to LA) you see it happen more and more often and it becomes more and more prevalent. I find it exhausting because there is no way to veg the whole drive unless you are the slowest car out there because at best someone is going to jab in front of you at the last second and you have to mash you brakes to avoid them.
The interesting thing is that this is always how the traffic flows on this road, and nowhere else. It must be a precise combination of traffic levels, lanes available, traffic mix, differring speeds and even average distance travelling, so people notice and feel compelled to respond to the pattern.
I noticed a similar phenomenon while driving on the highway. Vehicles on the other side of the road seem to group up and travel in clusters. Like traffic naturally oscillates into these packets?
There is very specific clumping behavior on the I5 in Northern California I've noticed. It is a long, 2 lane highway often used by truckers. It tends to be fairly congested but not ever backed up. What I see every time I drive it is a new clumping behavior that emerges: some big rigs tend to drive quite slow but do that thing where they want to pass someone going 54 and they are going 55 so it takes ages and the traf…
I think the specific pattern you're talking about happens because when a truck is passing slowly but infrequently, it makes some sense to be polite and line up behind it. When trucks are passing so frequently, and so incredibly slowly, being polite is useless. There needs to be a zipper merge happening behind the truck being passed. But the left lane people feel they've paid their dues by waiting in line, and half the right lane people don't even care. The right lane people also stay so close to the truck in front that they can't safely merge left at highway speeds anyway. People also tend to not fill back in to the right lane between truck passes. I'm not sure that would even help, but it does make people who do seem like cheaters to the people who refuse to.
Crowds of a high enough density push people in orbital waves, with both clockwise and counterclockwise oscillations pulsing at 18 second intervals through the crowd. Monitoring these motions in realtime is possible and may help prevent crowd crush events. Also: At high densities crowds act like sticky springs, with the ground adding the sticky. 18 seconds before the next wave of people crushes you. 18 seconds to get…
Two things that would deserve clarification (although outside of the scope of the research here) are: (1) When is it time to leave? At what threshold? Is it around an arm's length of free space between people? And (2) Where to go? Straight line towards an exit? Perpendicular to the crowd? Exactly against the flow? Along the flow but towards edges? Probably depends on a lot of parameters..
In the middle of a crowd/fluid your motion is determined by the humans/molecules around you. The closer you get to a wall, the fewer particles have an influence on you. Just make sure it's not a wall people are moving towards.
Not sure if anyone has studied how well this holds up to humans. Human crowds have very fluid-like behavior, but of course they don't behave perfectly like a liquid in a pipe