It’s summer, and more Americans are on the road. Crowded roads. So here are a few tips you may never have learned or have forgotten.
Some advice should be obvious, like getting out of the left lane on expressways if you are blocking cars by driving well under the speed limit. (Some states are cracking down on drivers who don’t understand this.)
And don’t slow down to look at an accident on the side of the highway. What would you hope to see? Just move along.
This is less obvious: Don’t change lanes so much. And don’t put yourself in positions where you have to brake so much.
Have you ever been in traffic that slowed to a crawl? You assume there must be a bad accident ahead — but sometimes when traffic finally gets moving again, there is no sign of trouble. What most likely happened is that drivers had to brake either to be safe or because they are bad drivers who sped and then braked and sped and then braked. This caused the driver behind to brake, and the person behind that driver to brake.
Soon you have a peristaltic action for miles down the highway as drivers touch their brakes. Even a slight variation in speed can do it, as Japanese scientists discovered when they asked drivers on a closed-loop track to maintain their speed. Eventually there was a jam.
Sometimes traffic slows because two lanes narrow to one. A bottleneck calls for a technique known as zippering. You may call it cutting in and cheating, but you have to get over that. The trick is, again, maintaining speed with less braking.
Drivers should use both lanes until traffic slows, then you do what they taught you in kindergarten: Be nice. Take turns. Instead of bunching up to prevent the jerk in the other lane from cutting in, you leave space so he can glide in. Then a car from your lane proceeds. Then you let another driver cut in. And so on. As you approach the final merging point, leave even more space. The nice people in Minnesota made an extra effort to teach motorists there how to do it.
I know, it sounds counterintuitive. But if everyone cooperates, it works, say traffic engineers.
Read more of the original article in The New York Times.
