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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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