| Re: Signal timing foiled by inattentive drivers [message #797253] |
Thu, 06 March 2008 18:00 |
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> There's a very good reason to "bull your way through" a Phalanx of
> Sloth: the longer you stay in close proximity to all those other
> vehicles, the greater the chance of one of them making some sort of
> mistake or otherwise causing a hazardous situation for you. The sooner
> you can break free of the Phalanx and establish a space cushion around
> your car, the better off you are. When I was in Driver's Ed, they
> tauight us to drive in the clear spaces between the "Wolf Packs," and
> I find that advice to be extremely sound.
Absolutely. But this is yet another situation -- the inexplicable
clustering up when there's all the room in the world to spread out and
decouple your driving from the misfortunes of others. I'm talking
about medium-heavy traffic out to the horizon, where the point is to
keep it flowing insofar as it does.
During a previous life when I had a 30-mile commute in miserable
freeway traffic, I did some experiments and proved to my own
satisfaction that
(a) it was *very* common to finish near cars I'd started with,
regardless of lane choice; and
(b) jumping around in search of the best-moving lane could provide
local improvement, but stringing together a series of such gains
rather than seeing them cancel out over the long haul was elusive, if
not illusive. Never mind the effects on those around and behind me --
again, the difference between the good of traffic and the (local/short-
term) good of an individual.
I'd also hypothesize that when you have a choice about proximity to
other cars, it is better to break away from the pack -- but when it
isn't a string of packs with gaps between them, but just a great
bawling herd, maneuvering among them entails risks of its own,
triggering a different risk-benefit decision.
--Joe
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