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Comment by fouc | Hacker News Reader

Frankly it's fine to create enough gap that people are passing in front of you.. My response is usually to widen the gap even more. It actually has the effect of helping to smooth traffic, reducing traffic jams.

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You are also reducing throughput, and causing more congestion behind you. There is no having our cake and eating it too. Once a road hits maximum capacity at the safest distance gaps between cars, the only way to increase the road capacity is to reduce the distance gaps between cars.

In addition to increasing the gap, you have to drive steadily, with no braking. This makes you become the most predictable car on the road, people behind you can follow steadily instead of constantly accelerating & braking. This leads to reduced congestion.

This CGP video covers some of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE

There is no steady in high congestion areas with lots of on and off ramps. The rules are nice when there is no congestion and plenty of room to spread out, but the problems are inevitable at rush times or at chokepoints.

Not all congestion are created by those chokepoints. It's created because someone at some point hit the brakes, and then cars behind get into a pattern of accelerating & braking constantly until the congestion resolves. Steady driving with lots of gaps helps resolve this faster and prevent congestion in general.

unless you do this in the left lane or something, it probably doesn't change throughput that much or at all. A major cause of traffic jams is cascades of braking, so leaving a safe distance allows for coasting instead of overreacting to brake lights, and prevents a traffic jam. You can get higher capacity temporarily, but eventually by reducing distance, you just cause a jam that destroys throughput.

> It actually has the effect of helping to smooth traffic, reducing traffic jams.

I hear this a lot from people who practice this sort of driving, but don't the simulations suggest that the opposite is true, traffic actually improves when drivers are more aggressive?

Having cars be "aggressive" in this context basically means they flow into the voids more readily.

An example would be moving left into a "this would be an impolite move in any other context" sized cap between two cars to in order to let someone merge and then getting right back out of the lane.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE

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