I wish Honda made a Civic Type R with a DCT.
I did my first 10 years of driving in a manual and when you get a hang of the gearbox you barely need the clutch at all. Just a light tap, barely disengage anything.
Nowadays the sequential dogbox in my motorcycle is my fav. Similar to what rally cars use. You only need the clutch when stopping, otherwise you can just jam between gears with a light flick of the throttle to relieve tension. No electronics.
Wish nonracing cars came with that option. I think some 90’s supercars have it.
I think in the mountains it’s the opposite. I wouldn’t want to drive 1km of elevation down without using the engine to control the speed. Brakes in most cars aren’t designed to engage continuously for long time, they overheat and may eventually fail.
One cannot realistically expect urban regions to have drivers that leave large spaces of road empty, it wouldn’t back up the congestion even further onto other roads.
It’s especially exacerbated because all vehicles and drivers have different reaction times and acceleration, so it’s inevitable that gaps will increase and decrease. Taking advantage of the gaps actually increases the road’s throughput, and is a sufficient tradeoff to risk and energy efficiency for almost all drivers worldwide.
Read the above as a rant for better transit.
Even better is to get the cars off the road by having good flow and not jamming it up.
"Closing the gaps" means tailgating or switching lanes to get into those sweet, wide open spaces. These are the primary causes of phantom traffic jams on congested freeways. There's a pretty good deep dive covering this[1].
[1] https://www.autoblog.com/2022/11/03/phantom-traffic-jams-pre...
This is not practical in most cases of congestion, which are caused by the number of vehicles exceeding the road's capacity. There is no other choice after a certain point, vehicles will begin to pile up and speed up and slow down creating the traffic waves.
That video is correct for only a minority of times where the road capacity has not been met, but people are accelerating and decelerating too fast causing the traffic waves.
However, during times of too many vehicles on the road, such as rush hour, there is nothing anyone can do, other than use as much of the road as possible (i.e. less empty space).
Your analysis misses safety and so while your facts are correct your conclusion is wrong. When more cars want to use a section of road than the road can handle you must not put more cars into the empty space without all the cars slowing down (which in turn means the road can handle less cars per time). I know that is not what everyone does, but they (we) are wrong.
> Taking advantage of the gaps actually increases the road’s throughput, and is a sufficient tradeoff to risk and energy efficiency for almost all drivers worldwide.
> the road can handle you must not put more cars into the empty space without all the cars slowing down (which in turn means the road can handle less cars per time)
I agree that there is a range where cars weaving in and out causing people to brake unnecessarily causes more congestion, but there is also a point where there is so much congestion that “filling in the gaps” becomes the optimal move, because the road’s capacity has been reached and maintaining large gaps would simply push congestion further back onto other roads.
You don't even need to maintain large gaps - you just need about two seconds of time between you and the car in front of you, and that varies based on the speed of traffic. Everyone going ~30mph with gaps is going to have a lot more throughput than everyone averaging 10mph with short gaps. Of course this is before you get into the increased risk of collisions with smaller gaps. One fender bender is enough to bring everything to a halt, and statistically with enough cars and short enough gaps those are basically guaranteed.