Found Stadler’s car.
I'd never drive a Saturn, but I'd write that on my window!!!!
And that's the rub. This is the "tragedy of the commons" in a way. Everyone thinks "oh, one car isn't going to make a difference!" or "you're not going anywhere anyway, so what's the big deal?" But some interchanges have 10,000 or more cars moving through in a day (sometimes in HOURS) and when you mulitply that six or seven car lengths, instead of the one or two that is normal for slow moving traffic, you're increasing the car density by that same amount. There are books and studies done on this. I took an entire class in college on "traffic". There's a great book called "Traffic" on this very subject. On a highway, most congestion is caused by the speed DIFFERENTIAL, where you have cars moving at different rates through a finite area. It's a dick move to some, but if you have a two lane merge into one, it's faster for EVERYONE if cars fill BOTH LANES and then merge, peacefully, one at a time at the choke point. Stopping halfway down to merge slows everything down because you now have a speed differential and you have the uncertainty of what the other car is doing next.
On a state or rural road, if you have one car holding up five or ten, doesn't seem like much, but if any of those cars can even make it through ONE light quicker on their journey, that can reduce their time on the road by upwards of 15 minutes. This is science, folks, not about "whether that douchebag got one over on me and is ahead of me!" It's not a wrestling match, it's a fluid dynamics problem.
Topic: What pissed you off today? (Read 124451 times)
