Quote:
Originally Posted by Natalya
I heard (lol how much stupid stuff starts with those two words?) that most stop-and-go on the highway is related to the flow on one section of the highway having a different speed from the next section, and the stop-go is the adjustment between the two speeds.
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There's a portion of my commute that, for about a mile, is prone to terrible stop-and-go rippling for exactly the reason you describe. The ripples can propagate as much as another mile or so upstream, it's ridiculous.
Getting into the left lane and pushing up to a higher speed is the strategy at that point. And even so sometimes a ripple can develop there; maintaining a large gap between myself and the next guy can help a lot to mitigate or cancel them out, but there's almost always some fool crowding my bumper, gnawing at his steering wheel because the twerp in the little Honda won't close up that gap.
I can't get my good mileage on that part, but influencing others' behavior and preserving my gap mean not getting hit with the ripple, which would be even worse. I just wish it weren't so stressful, having to resist the peer pressure of the tailgaters who are so dissatisfied that I won't fill the gap.