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In order for everyone to just freaking go, their cars would have to be attached somehow.
I wonder if anyone’s ever thought of linking a bunch of cars together so they can all stop and go simultaneously. And hey, since the cars are attached and all need to go to the same place, we can build a track instead of using high maintenance rubber on pavement and-
oop, we invented trains
I love re-deriving the train when people talk about autonomous cars/trucking and how they can already do the highway part easily
What I dont fucking get is that even in Europe where even in shitty countries like Hungary and Slovakia we have train tracks that’s about thousandfold what the US has, and we still put shit on Semis and have them drive between cities, cities that are all fucking connected by train.
Why aren’t we fucking putting everything on goddamn fucking trains, and then do only the last miles of the delivery on trucks, they could even be electric as that would eliminate all the drawbacks of electric semis, having them only go short distances
Maybe do the last mile with trains like the Swiss do
And instead of each one having a small engine, we could combine it all into a big one more efficient than separate ones would be!
Some sort of linked car-train lane that your car could use self-driving software to enter and leave would be an interesting concept. Like HOV but everyone is linked at the same speed.
Interesting in concept i guess, but orders of magnitude less efficient than a train.
Traffic dynamics are really interesting. Even after you clear the obstruction, the traffic jam remains and becomes a “ghost jam” that propagates backwards down the road until it eventually fizzles out.
I agree, I think mythbusters did a small scale test in a circle.
The Mythbusters also built a sweet plow truck that would get you through traffic.
It takes but an idiot. And 1/10 people on the road are idiots. So that’s an idiot every 100m while commuting. There’s no surprise.
At least 1/10 of them are idiots.
also, very respectfully to my mom and grandpa (RIP) old people have to stop driving. My mom is 65 and in pretty good shape so she refuses to stoo driving. She only have 2 road modes: Maniac or Tourtle. She’ll alone create a standstill in a highway OR she’ll almosr kill herself and everyone else on the road. No midle ground
You’re not in traffic, you are traffic
Yeah but I’m trying to GO smoothly and courteously. Somewhere up ahead someone (or many someones) is stopping or merging badly or doing something else stupid to create these phantom traffic jams.
There is nothing more American than being in traffic. You’re never more in touch with a systemic failure, yet we blame it on the choices of individual drivers, all the while unaware that we’re part of the problem.
my man have you ever been in, like, another country?
No, but they definitely don’t have traffic in Germany. They have the Autobahn, the perfect solution to any and every traffic problem that could ever exist.
You wouldnt say that after trying to get through Berlin or one of the other major cities
Hogwash! It’s impossible for Berlin to have any traffic, all the cars are on the Autobahn, and they always go fast. Always. Nobody ever goes slow on the Autobahn. It’s actually illegal to go slow in Germany. You can cruise through Berlin at 200 MPH (but never slower than 100 MPH, that’s illegal) anytime of day thanks to the Autobahn dramatic reverb
It’s a little of column a and a little of column b. When I’m driving and some absolute piece of garbage is riding directly next to the car to their right, I equate them to a blood clot, which is funny, because they also make me feel like having an aneurysm. I also don’t forgive the driver on the right, because they are more than capable of allowing a space for other drivers to pass.
The absolute lack of awareness on the road is startling. I swear to God, people are looking through straws and their neck doesn’t move.
Building extra lanes, though, does not solve the problem.
they keep switching lanes
They have to get up to speed and there are so many on ramps that don’t give enough space to actually get up to highway speeds. And some places (like my fucking dumbass city) have 30 of them spaced only 10 feet apart, so you have a lot of people going really slow getting on the freeway, so everyone else has to slow or stop to avoid hitting them.
Quite a few cities in the Northeast are designed this way, because they were done so in the 1950’ swith the intent of highway traffic doing 40, maybe 45 MPH through town at maximum. To conserve expensive urban land, they have short ramps and merge areas that were appropriate for those speeds, not to mention the lower overall volume of traffic in those times. And now we’re stuck with it, because it’ll be a 200 year long court battle to eminent domain the 427 landowners who are all clinging to five square feet each in the patch you’d require for a longer ramp, all hoping for a fat payout to let go of it.
And nowadays, of course, everyone takes it as their god given right to do 90+ MPH on the freeway at all times, and get frothingly pissed off if they can’t for any reason whatsoever. So the ramps aren’t long enough anymore because no one is using the highway as designed.
You live in a shitty car centric designed city with poor public transportation.
Ftfy, fucking suburban shit ass sprawl is even spreading to my country like a plague, fuck that shit
There’s actually a good bus system here. But it’s literally the city in American Graffiti so the first part is accurate.
How is standing in traffic a real thing? Mfer just pass everyone on your bike!
The CGP Grey video on Traffic is a decent explainer on how traffic happens to begin with and how it gets relieved, kind of like a traffic snake that grows and shrinks, travelling in the direction opposite to traffic.
This City Nerd Video explains how traffic gets exponentially worse as it increases.
It usually starts with someone making a dumb move at a merge, changing lanes or another person forgetting to brake until the very last moment. That’s part of the reason I don’t see much benefit in adding more lanes to a highway save for very few exceptions, since you’ll just have more changing lanes leading to slowdowns and extending a section that was a bottleneck often just shifts the bottleneck somewhere else.
So anyways, I’ll keep preaching to the choir: trains, trains, we need more buses and trains.
https://youtu.be/oafm733nI6U?si=dUBMco9Ql-QtLF2a
Broke: thinking cgp greys video is informative and good
Woke: realizing cgo greys video is fucking stupid and car brained
