When Good Drivers Go Bad...

[Funny]

Well, This kind of throws a wrench into the hypermiling lifestyle... When 40% of people are driving like jerks, jamming risk is lowest. What are your thoughts on the subject? The original post came from Slashdot, posted below.

"Traffic jams are minimized if a significant fraction of drivers break the rules by doing things like passing on the wrong side or changing lanes too close to an intersection. The insight comes from a cellular automata study published this month in the journal Physical Review E. In effect, people who disregard the rules help to break up the groups that form as rule-followers clump together. The risk of jamming is lower if all people obey the rules than if they all disobey them, according to the analysis, but jamming risk is lowest when about 40 percent of people drive like jerks."

Slashdot Technology Story | Rude Drivers Reduce Traffic Jams

[doviatt]

Wouldn't this include the behaviors of Hypermilers? Some think our behavior is rude like leaving a gap in front of us. This gap does benefit breaking up the jam. I guess the other extreme could have similar benefit. I really don't need the jerks to be justified with their actions though. Some hypermilers do try not to be jerks but it is the perception that matters.

[evolutionmovement]

I love that some anarchy is necessary for optimal efficiency, but too much just causes a big mess. As with everything, moderation is the key, even the number of jerks (which I'll admit to being one of on occasion, but trying getting anywhere around Boston otherwise).

[basjoos]

I wonder if the people doing this study wrote into their program the traffic jams caused by the occasional collisions that this type of behavior would tend to create in the real world? When 2 cellular automata "close collide" with each other in a computer simulation, they normally just keep on moving in a new direction. It wouldn't bring them to a halt unless a provision to do so was written into their code. But when 2 vehicles bump each other in real life, that can bring the whole column of traffic to a halt until the collision was cleared. This is one of the pitfalls that can occur when trying to interpret data generated in an idealized world and applying it to the real world. You have to think of and include all of the variables.

[cfg83]

Funny -

They are accounting for the "risk of jamming", but are they also accounting for "risk of accident"?

A similar thing is 100% computer controlled driving. Today we have the tech to make cars do all the driving, which leads to smaller gaps between cars, which leads to increased car volume capacity on the freeways and such. The corollary to this is massive car pileups when something goes wrong.

CarloSW2

[tasdrouille]

You can always find a study to prove anything, but its the general consensus among studies that counts.

[Piwoslaw]

The greatest reduction of jamming was observed when 90% of the drivers left their cars at home and took the train.

Life would be soooooo much easier if everyone would just get out of my way. No traffic jams, no pointless stopping, no gas wasted. At least for me. Because I'm a cellular automaton. (Just kidding ;p)

[MazdaMatt]

Interesting that they would consider "passing on the wrong side" to be a jerk move... i wonder if they consider "not getting the hell over when you're holding people up" to be a jerk move...

Passing on the right is a jerk move, but in my opinion, if someone has enough room to pass you on the right, then you are a jerk because you had enough room to move your own slow arse to the right so you're not in the way.

Even on days when i feel like cruising at 120 on the highway, I ALWAYS move into the right-most lane that I can safely drive in. If there's a gap in the middle that will let me run there for 10 seconds, i move over in case someone wants to come up faster on the left.

I LOATH people that sit in the middle lane at a slower pace than the people in the right lane. They plug up the highway.

[evolutionmovement]

In my observation, most accidents are caused by distraction, not bad behavior. Lack of sleep, chemical ingestion, ******* kids in the car, eating, reading, and damned personal electronic gadgets are far more dangerous. How else are there so many rear end collisions in slow traffic? Rollovers I don't know the cause. Could be idiots driving recklessly or could be not paying attention causing last second maneuvers that exceed the ability of the vehicle (we all know which kind they usually are) to safely handle since they're too stupid to just go past the exit they missed and on to the next one to turn around. I also see a lot of morons driving too fast for conditions, which isn't necessarily the same kind of driving mentioned in the study.

[yang]

This is an easy one.

I'm usually skeptical of media reporting of research results. This one sounded particularly sketchy so I hunted down the actual paper. Unsurprisingly, the article completely misrepresented the original paper.

The original paper is a simulation of PEDESTRIAN traffic, a tiny aspect of pedestrian traffic at that. The paper clearly acknowledged the difference between pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Findings of the original paper has zero applicability to vehicle traffic. The paper simulates people walking towards each other. If no one steps out of the way, a collision occurs, causing a "jam." The "people" in the simulation are given probabilities of stepping to the left or right. The rule abiding people always step to the right. The rule breakers has a 50% chance of stepping to the right or left. The conclusion is that the absolute minimum risk of jam occurs when a crowd has some rule breakers.

So, this clearly has nothing to do with traffic on our roads unless you live in a city where everyone plays chicken with their cars. This is a case of an author glancing over an abstract, picking up an interesting idea like: "a small number of rule breakers reduce traffic jams" and writing a BS article around that sentence. The author clearly didn't read the actual paper AT ALL. If she just read the introduction, her totally false and out of context article wouldn't exist.

This is irresponsible journalism to say the least.