Tailgating Officially Makes Traffic Worse, Jerks

[EmersonHart13]

https://lifehacker.com/tailgating-officially-makes-traffic-worse-jerks-1821391848

If you’ve ever encountered a “phantom traffic jam,” or traffic slowdown that doesn’t seem to have an apparent cause, it was probably some jackwagon tailgating somebody. Researchers at MIT found that not only does tailgating not get you anywhere faster, it actually creates traffic jams that shouldn’t exist.

Tailgating, or the act of driving so closely behind someone you could write “wash me” in the dirt on their rear window, has always been rude (not to mention unsafe). At best the car in front of you will speed up a little in fear of being road rage murdered, but more than likely you’ll just look like an impatient jerk. And what’s worse is you’re making things less convenient for yourself and every other driver in your lane, says MIT professor Berthold Horn and postdoctoral associate Liang Wang. In order for traffic to keep moving smoothly, Horn says cars need to be evenly spaced on the road:

“Our work shows that, if drivers all keep an equal distance between the cars on either side of them [front and back], such ‘perturbations’ would disappear as they travel down a line of traffic, rather than amplify to create a traffic jam...”

Here’s a nifty animated graphic to explain what happens:

via CSAIL / MIT
Basically, when you tailgate, you remove your ability to slow down gradually in the event a car up ahead reduces its speed. Because you have less time to react and avoid rear-ending the car in front of you, you hit the brakes hard and take away all of your vehicle’s momentum in an instant. All the cars behind you then have to slow down quickly as well while you build up speed again. It causes a chain reaction that eventually brings traffic to a crawl—or causes accidents—for no good reason.

Of course, Horn and Wang are very aware people aren’t going to stop tailgating or pay more attention to the space between themselves and other vehicles, so they hope adding features to future vehicles can fix the problem. By implementing what they call “bilateral control” into adaptive cruise-control systems, phantom traffic jams may become a thing of the past. They estimate drivers may even be able to get somewhere nearly twice as fast. Until then, give yourself plenty of space between you and the car ahead as best you can. It benefits everybody on the road.

Improving traffic - by tailgating less | MIT

https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/improving-traffic-tailgating-less

Click to read more...

 

[nytebyte]

I never tailgate, but if I leave too big a gap between me and the person in front of me, inevitably some asshole will insert themselves into that gap causing the traffic jam depicted above.

 

[b4black]

Duh, I bet anyone that's ever driven in bid city traffic could have told you this without an MIT study.


I think MIT has better things to do.

 

[Chester Copperpot]

I never tailgate, but if I leave too big a gap between me and the person in front of me, inevitably some asshole will insert themselves into that gap causing the traffic jam depicted above.

It's a very fine line of staying back far enough that if the person hits their brakes you can just coast down while maintaining some speed, and not leaving so much space that someone inevitably decides to dart in and fuck the whole thing up.

 

[Blood on Blood]

Yep - drive 2 cars or so back

 

[Bru]

Like that Japanese study a few years ago that coined "shockwave" traffic jam. Mythbusters did a segment on it too.

 

[CMNTMXR57]

Tailgating isn't what bothers me. It's when you're stopped and people INSIST on parking on your bumper. I know that doesn't add much to this study and the conversation, just sayin'.

 

[SMKE EM]

Tailgating isn't what is causing that traffic problem. The constant variance in speed is.

Look at the top, everyone is doing the same exact speed in a perfect world. But in an imperfect world not everyone's speedometers are accurate to one another. The roads aren't perfect, sometimes there's real reasons to hit your brakes while travelling.

The simulation above tries to prove a point with an unrealistic expectation of reality. People need to change lanes and often times requires slowing down to do so to get behind another car in the next lane over. This could just as easily been the same model used to show that.

This study is a wash.

 

[Blood on Blood]

Tailgating is caused by Jackwads who can’t merge “on to” and “off of” an express way for dick.

Also caused by Ghey Prius drivers.

 

[MikeyLikesIt]

The animation clearly shows tailgating and the traffic jam was caused by the dumbass not keeping up with traffic.
Probably some schmuck in a POS 50's/60's Lincoln.

 

[OffshoreDrilling]

Causes of traffic jams: scrap trucks driving 45mph in the fast lane, mini vans driving the speed of traffic in the fast lane with 10 car spaces ahead of them then braking hard when anyone gets in front of them, box trucks that shouldn’t be in the fast lane, people merging then cutting over three lanes then cutting over three lanes again to get off at the next exit, totally clueless hands at 10 and 2 driver with their brights on.