this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
675 points (99.0% liked)
Lemmy Shitpost
27208 readers
3836 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.
Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means:
-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
1.Memes
10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)
Reach out to
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I've been watching traffic patterns for a while... Pretty much since I started driving.
I've wanted to answer the question of why does traffic get so bad sometimes?
The best analysis I can give from all of my observations is.... People SUCK at merging. They don't give space, they try to race to the "front" in lanes that are closing.... Nobody actually knows how to zipper merge properly.
Listen, there's basically two things you need to successfully zipper merge:
For anyone in a lane that's being merged into: make space for merging traffic.
I know legally, that the driver entering the lane will have to find space to merge into, and the drivers in the lane where others are merging into, don't have a legal requirement to provide space, but by being a dickhead about it, you're actively choosing to make things worse for everyone. Just give some space. It's really not hard.
Everyone is more interested in getting somewhere fast, rather than doing things efficiently, in collaboration with fellow road users.... So, when someone inevitably gets cut off by someone who simply must be in front, and they have to slow down, it takes a lot of time for the impact from that showdown, to be recovered by traffic behind the offender.
But trying to re-educate millions, if not billions of drivers to not be horrible at merging, isn't something that's realistically going to happen.
Whenever you hear about "congestion" slowdowns, this seems to be the cause just about every time.
I can actively see this on some highways near me, they have an exit on one stretch of highway through a fairly large city, every mile. I can almost time it for when we get to an exit, vs when we get to an on-ramp, simply by when we slow down or speed up, exclusively due to this phenomenon.
Crashes and wrecks are a whole other issue. Between everyone being shit at merging, all the goddamned rubberneckers, and people making generally idiotic choices to change lanes when they have no idea what is going on..... We're fucked.
I don't hate traffic because it's slow. I hate traffic because it's entirely a product of people being stupid.
There's more to it than that - there's a lot of research involved. Other factors involve:
Chief offender is the cascade effect. Basically, there is a minimum convenient distance one can follow another at a given speed in given conditions. If thee guy in front of them does anything but keep going, they should be able to deal with it without slamming on the brakes.
But if people follow more closely than that, especially because the traffic volume increases, then when car A slams on their breaks, so do cars B, C, D, E, etc. then because everyone's reaction speeds are marginally different, by the time you get to car F, everyone's come to a hard stop, while car A goes on, oblivious that they created a traffic jam that may or may not have been inevitable.
I agree with the cascade effect, it's literally the reason why bad driving compounds into a traffic jam.
The thing is, if you leave sufficient following distance, someone is going to take it as an invitation to merge, so people in general, wanting to be in front, tend to follow more closely, so nobody else can get in front of them and push them further back in traffic.
So they follow too closely, someone brakes, and cascade of failure. Why they brake? Lots of stupid shit, often because someone entering the lane of traffic in front decided they're getting in front of someone else even if it kills everyone, then brakes, and cascade.... The cycle continues.
Yea that cascade effect is huge. If everyone does what they're supposed to you really shouldn't need brakes on the highway much. Better to move continuously at a slow pace than tailgate and have to stop and go. It takes a second or two to actually move from a stop and that adds up over hundreds of cars when you add in the delay for everyone's reaction time.
I've had the same fascination!
A video I really enjoyed was a simplified experiment where they had some cars drive around in a closed loop - a single lane circle.
Traffic jams still inevitably somehow popped up, suggesting that we're simply bad drivers haha. Higher level autonomous cars cannot come fast enough.
Yep. The inability to understand how to merge correctly, IMO, goes hand in hand with being a bad driver.
While merging is by far one of the most notable issues, it's certainly not the only one.
It becomes much harder to zipper merge, when there is a red light ~500m ahead and said 500m is almost full.
I also hate it when I am waiting at a red light and someone nearby suggests me to just skip the light, because I won't get a fine (bicycle). I feel like people taking a test for the license (and renewing their license) should be reminded that the reason traffic laws exist is to prevent traffic jams and accidents.
Anyone suggesting you should skip a light because you're on a bike, is not someone you want to listen to.
Stay safe out there.
Last time I remember, it was a Swiggy driver. Those are infamous for not caring about traffic rules. Probably not much about their lives either.
The chap would have cut the light himself, if it were not for the police car nearby.
0 upvotes 0 down votes at time of writing. I agree with you, though.