The replication process makes worse and worse copies over time. Plus the cleanup crew gets confused and weak. Each bit of aging makes the process of keeping you young work less well, and hence you age more + faster.
iirc almost all industries follow S shaped curves, exponential at first, then asymptotic at the end... So just because we're on the ramp up of the curve doesn't mean we'll continue accelerating, let alone maintain the current slope. Scientific breakthroughs often require an entirely new paradigm to break the asymptote, and often the breakthrough cannot be attained by incumbents who are entrenched in their way working plus have a hard time unseeing what they already know
In my place, there's a significant group of drivers who will ride your tail too close hoping you'll move over so they can get 1 car ahead. And if they see more than 0.9 car length in front of you they will do what they can (weaving other lanes) to try and get into that space, 1 car ahead of you.
As far as I can tell it's pure selfishness and competitiveness. Their desire isn't to cooperate and arrive it's to take from others for their own gain.
Also "Only pass in the left lane" only makes sense when the lanes aren't significantly full. The guy in the left lane wants to do 90mph but the average speed of traffic is <55mph. Should I move over just because I'm doing 55 (despite wanting to do 65) and they want to do 90? They can only do 90 if there's a cascading group of drivers in front of them who defer their own desires to the desire of the most aggressive. Seems obvious to me that moving over to let them pass is not the right move.
It's frustrating because someone is taking your safety buffer as their opportunity to travel faster. And it results in you having to travel slower and slower to maintain the gap that is constantly consumed, tragedy of the commons style, by opportunists.
Slow down a bit to create another buffer. You can even do this before they have merged, as part of the bit where you allow them to safely merge.
I think if you reflect a bit you'll find you are being the same kind of person as them, if you are getting angry that you have to slow down and give up space for someone else. I understand some people can be aggressive though, that can be frustrating regardless of the outcome.
I don't think you're understanding. The point is that 20 people in a row will take advantage of your buffer to slow you down again and again and again, which makes you get to your destination later... because they're being selfish to get somewhere faster, and you're not so you get to where you're going slower.
We're not talking about where they're changing lanes to take the next exit. We're talking about where your lane happens to be moving faster, so they merge in front of you in an unsafe way to take advantage of that and just stay there. Why should you be expected to give them space, as you suggest? How is that fair, that they should get to their destination faster instead of you? Do you not see how that's going to rightfully make someone angry? When they should be waiting for a safe space to open up, rather than forcing you to slow down to create one?
I understand perfectly, 20 years driving, I think people just don't like that the safe answer is to be slow. You will not fix others behaviour, so your options are be slow and generous, get out of the chaotic lanes (unless that's all of them), or join them and be aggressive, claim space, be stressed and annoyed your whole trip.
There is no solution to traffic here sorry, this is more about managing your own frustration and expectations when faced with people at their worst, in the worst form of transport.
The total, confirmed, 100% effective solution is to never commute by highway during peak hours, but few get that option.
I object to the "late" argument made by etho's parent. The difference in time to destination will inevitably be dominated by lights, in city travel, not by modest speed differences (say 45 vs 55) on a highway. Being safe & out of the way is the trick! It would be nice if we got rid of left & u turns and build our roads for that!
The subsidies for cars is crazy when you look at it from that perspective. What you need to do is invest a lot of money in areas and systems that can make it better over time. In the end you are going to spend less.
Ehto is correct and this is the way. I'll go further and say that if someone is tailgating you and it's pissing you off, generously let them pass. Literally pull to the side of the road if you must.
The issue is that when you slow down, you’re (a) creating ‘turbulence’ in the traffic flow with increased speed differential between cars and increased lane changes, which increases accident risk for everybody, and (b) it’s not even solving the problem because you still perpetually have some impatient driver wedging themself in directly in front of you, deleting your buffer zone.
It’s safer to drive a little closer, keep up with other traffic and defend what gap you can in front of you.
Agree with your conclusion here, though. The best response is to simply not drive in this kind of traffic.
Hard disagree. It is not safer to ignore your safety buffer. It is certainly not safer to defend your buffer.
If traffic is very busy, the trick is to just accept people will wedge in front of you and keep going slightly smaller each time to increase the buffer again. You might create 'turbulence', which might possibly decrease the safety a bit for all the impatient drivers doing the wedging. But it increases your own safety. And therefore also that of the people following you and your passengers.
I'm also not convinced on the 'turbulence' part. Keeping a buffer smoothes out any sudden speed variations of the people in front of you, which makes the traffic behind you flow better.
And it might maybe feel a lot slower to let a 100 cars go in front of you on your commute, but just driving 99km/h when the person in front of you does 100 is enough to increase your gap and it makes a whopping 1% of difference.
The only thing is: sometimes a road is just too busy and the space for a buffer just isn't there to begin with. At that point the speeds should go down to accommodate the smaller buffers, which is actually what happens here in the netherlands as long as there aren't too many people ignoring the speeds advisory boards above the highway.
> The issue is that when you slow down, you’re (a) creating ‘turbulence’ in the traffic flow with increased speed differential between cars and increased lane changes, which increases accident risk for everybody, and (b) it’s not even solving the problem because you still perpetually have some impatient driver wedging themself in directly in front of you, deleting your buffer zone.
That's very obviously not true. Slowing down always reduces energy in the system and always reduces global turbulence. It's one of the reasons that countries that lower speed limits see journey times reduce.
Is there a statistics name for the last part? I'd like to compare different countries. It's definitely NOT true in Colombia at least, which makes me believe OP more.
We in Colombia had a public service announcement where it showed someone driving really fast (while still respecting semaphores), and another one going with just enough speed. In the end, they both reach the last semaphore almost at the same time and then they part ways. Essentially it shows that driving crazy fast in the city doesn't necessarily gets you faster to your destination.
Now that I'm an adult, I tested it several times, and it matches 90% of my attempts, but that's in the city, with semaphores. No way I'd think letting everybody steal everybody else's buffer would provide for a reduction in journey time, even in highways. You're adding items to a queue, it'll take longer.
Now, it is probably safer, but we can only take so much even if we are not in a rush.
Slowing down on a busy highway does not reduce turbulence at all, it add chaos and unpredictability to the system. Once car suddenly slowing down to create a buffer zone causes the car behind to slow more and more and can often lead to a stop further back. This has been proven time and again on closed loop systems studying highway traffic flow. They are known as "phantom" traffic jams or shockwave traffic jams. Example, https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13402-shockwave-traff...
Yes, and they are caused by sudden decelerations which are the result of many factors, including driving too fast for the conditions, roadway, and traffic, and tailgating.
> Slowing down on a busy highway does not reduce turbulence at all,
The only thing that reduces global turbulence reliably on any roadway is reducing speed. All the simulations and real-world implementations show this. It's unambiguous and uncontroversial, except that it requires drivers to slow down, which is politically untenable in many jurisdictions.
> Slowing down on a busy highway does not reduce turbulence at all, it add chaos and unpredictability to the system. Once car suddenly slowing down...
I agree that slowing down "suddenly" causes turbulence. However, slowing down *gradually* allows you to build up a safety buffer which in turn allows you to avoid slowing down suddenly.
It is more dangerous to be slow and have people constantly merging in front of you, rather than be slightly faster and not have all the merging. Accidents happen when vehicles are going different speeds, all things equal.
Obviously it is safer to have longer follow distances, all things equal. But you don't accomplish that if you leave a long follow distance that is cut off a few seconds later by another car trying to get ahead. You end up with a constant stream of cars cutting your follow distance to less than what it would have been if you had just stayed slightly closer to the car in front of you.
We don't live in an ideal world, and having a bunch of cars merging in front of you definitely makes you less safe than having a static situation. I try to make sure I can see through/around the car in front of me, so that I have advance notice of what's happening down the road.
American road laws are insane here. The law should be simple; you must be in the outside lane at all times unless you are overtaking, and once you're done overtaking, you should merge back into the outside lane.
As far as I know that’s the law in every state I’ve driven in, but enforcement is pretty much nonexistent. Some states like Texas or Louisiana might have signs reminding people to stay out of the inner lanes except for passing but I’ve never heard of anyone getting a ticket over it. What’s enforcement like in the UK?
That used to be the case in Ireland too, but confusion due to cultural contamination means pretty much everyone moved to numbering lanes (from the "outside"/"slow"/leftmost lane).
When I did my B license test probably about 30 years ago, the Rules of the Road all referenced inside/outside lanes. When I did my CE license last year, it had been updated to only use lanes 1, 2, 3 etc.
Obviously fast and slow are just colloquial terms.
Why? If everyone followed the rules the lanes would segment into slowest on the right, with gradually increasing speed to the left and people moving between the lanes as needed to overtake. It would be far far far better than the chaos of having to move across all the lanes of traffic all the time because there are random campers driving below the speed limit in every single lane.
First, everyone switches right as soon as there's a gap in a righter lane, so lots of unnecessary switching. Second, the right lane is always full making it hard to merge on or off the highway. Third, the leftmost lanes are underutilized when they could be filled with people who have a long way to go until their offramp.
My decades-long impeccable driving record tends to indicate otherwise. I just don't drive as if I lived in the fantasy land where leaving a long follow distance means I have a lot of room in front of me. It doesn't. It means I get cut off, and the follow distance ends up being shorter than it would have been had I just been following at the same distance as all the other cars on the road.
It is possible of course that the highways you drive are just too busy and the max speed is actually set too high for how busy the road is. That happens more than you'd want because lowering the max of a highway is always an unpopular thing to, even if it's needed.
Still, I tend to find that people underestimate the danger of short distances. Often it's just better to accept a 100 cars going in front of you than to shrug off following someone at 1.5 seconds. It can go well for years because crashes are rare, but when you are in a crash you will be royally screwed when you don't have the reaction distance needed.
This assumes that you can actually maintain a 3 second follow distance. On some roads, you simply cannot, and an attempt to maintain such a distance leads to increased danger from all the cars that cut in.
Simply put: follow distance is not a unilateral decision.
If you actually want the safest option then you should merge all the way right and keep slowing down. Noone is going to merge right if they are trying to go faster, they will only do it to get off the offramp. Meaning the gap will reopen as people exit through the offramp or merge left into faster lanes.
If you choose to go in the fastlane in traffic you should understand that it will have people who do not care about the following distance as much and are just trying to go as fast as possible.
I have found that often times in heavy traffic the rightmost lane can be just as fast or actually faster than a middle or left lane.
> Noone is going to merge right if they are trying to go faster
In my experience even cars that are not trying to go faster will happily merge in front of you unsafely all the time, just because they don't understand the concept of a safe distance.
> If you choose to go in the fastlane in traffic you should understand that it will have people who do not care about the following distance as much and are just trying to go as fast as possible.
It's not about choosing to go in the fast lane. It's about the fact that in heavy traffic, you have no idea which lane will be fastest, because they're all heavy and which one is fastest keeps switching.
> I have found that often times in heavy traffic the rightmost lane can be just as fast or actually faster than a middle or left lane.
That's exactly my point. Which is why you can be in the right lane, and tons of people from the slower lane will try to merge in front of you if you're keeping a safe distance from the car in front.
Your advice is staying in the right lane doesn't apply in these situations.
This is a long thread of people talking past each other. The bottom line is simply this: if you want to drive with a larger-than-average following distance (call it whatever you want, a safety buffer, a "proper" following distance, the point is it is a distance less than the average following distance of the other drivers on the road) then you have to accept that you will not be able to drive at the same speed as the other traffic on the road. It's physically impossible. It can be psychologically frustrating because you see all the cars around you moving at X mph but your self-imposed constraints mean you can only make way at (X minus Y) mph. But them's the breaks, no pun intended
> It can be psychologically frustrating because you see all the cars around you moving at X mph but your self-imposed constraints mean you can only make way at (X minus Y) mph.
This is correct, but I get the sense that people overestimate Y.
Let's say you're driving 60 mph and following the "three second rule" which gives you a ~264 foot safety buffer. A driver then cuts into this safety buffer. Let's assume they like to go fast and enter closer to the front of the buffer so they reduce your safety buffer down to two seconds. In response, you gradually rebuild the safety buffer back to three seconds, costing you an extra second. Soon after you rebuild the safety buffer another car cuts in front of you. Let's say this process repeats every mile of your journey, costing you an extra second every time. This results in you traveling slightly over ~59 mph, making Y = ~1 mph.
Compare that to the lifetime odds of dying in a car crash in the U.S. which is roughly 1 in 100. It's hard to eliminate that entirely, but I'm willing to spend an extra ~1s per car that cuts in front of me to reduce it for myself and my passengers.
Not so. Keeping a constant distance from the car ahead means both cars are moving at the same speed. When a jerk cuts in, after a moment all 3 cars will be moving at the same speed.
We are saying the same thing. When a jerk cuts in, drivers readjust their speed to maintain desired following distance. Net effect, slower speed for all but the lead car
If you personally start with that slower speed to begin with (AKA much longer following distance), you don't have to worry about adjusting down
The fastlane is just another name for the leftmost lane, I am not talking about the one moving fastest.
Again we are not talking about the fastest lane here we are talking about the safest as the OP was concerned about following distance.
> That's exactly my point. Which is why you can be in the right lane, and tons of people from the slower lane will try to merge in front of you
If everyone merged right it would not longer be faster but people do not do this. In the right lane you can slow down as much as you want and never cause an issue so you can always make a gap. In any other lane if you slow down more than traffic you cause issues because people will then try and pass you from the right which is dangerous.
You are placing the burden of your forward following gap on the cars around you but that is a terrible way to drive. You need to be in control of yourself when driving, do not trust that someone is going to follow traffic laws, do not trust that they will go whatever way there turn signal says, do not trust that they will look over there shoulder before merging.
If YOU want a following gap then the only possible safe way to do this is to merge all the way right and slow down whenever someone merges in front of you. There is no other way to do it in heavy traffic. And YES you will have to live with the fact that you will be driving slower than the traffic around you. That's the trade you make if you choose to have a large following gap.
You’re the problem because of the way you are thinking. You don’t own the asphalt in front of you. You’re angry because in your mind you do, and you feel righteous about it. That’s why you are casting a moral judgement about them.
The most efficient throughput of the road system is not for people to “politely” queue up for 5 miles. People should be utilizing the rod and merging in an orderly manner. By adopting some arbitrary self imposed practice that is leading to 20 drivers cutting in front of you, are the one creating an unsafe situation.
Correct, but you _need_ the asphalt in front of you for both safe driving and also to avoid cascading hard braking events. I also don't own the asphalt under me or behind me too, so it's kinda a silly statement tbh.
You do, but if you leave so much that 20 cars are pulling in front of you, you’ve either driving too slow or misjudged and left unnecessary space. At 15-20 mph traffic speeds, you need 8-20 feet. Ideally, cars in a multiple lane to one lane exit scenario should be zipper merging when congestion reduces speeds. Engineers model this behavior and try to design roads to encourage it.
If you do that and get angry when people change lanes in front of you, you have consciously or subconsciously decided you own that 20 foot gap. That reaction impairs judgement and causes accidents.
To be completely clear the conversation is entirely not about zipper merging, but about people who are using safety gaps as opportunities for them to traffic weave attaining a faster than average travel speed at the cost of every one else's average travel speed and safety
Nobody is getting screwed. I've been the person making the gap many many times. You just ignore them, it isn't hard - they are way up there and I'm way back here, plenty of space. I just keep on with my business of safely driving. Sure I often wish I could go the speed limit - but in reality I'm going almost as fast as they are so it isn't like a few feet lost costs me anything. Odds are I'll be stopped at a red light and lose a lot more time once I get off the highway.
Besides, there are only a few people who ever merge in front of me (and then those who don't merge block their lane so nobody else can get in).
In high traffic you’re definitely being screwed - both by the continuing lack of a proper safety gap, and by not being able to go a normal speed. Which does add up in many of these situations.
But I guess we should just all self gaslight to feel better about it?
In Bay Area traffic I’d literally be not moving at all for most of the time if I followed you advice, in heavy traffic. That’s the exact situation I’m talking about.
If 20 people take advantage of your buffer, then you are delayed by a distance of 20 vehicle-lengths + 20 follow-distances. This is about 1000 meters, a distance which you can travel in about 45 seconds. So the net effect of all 20 people merging in front of you is less than a minute delay on your trip. Unless there is an almost constant stream of people merging in front of you, this isn't adding up to more than a percentage point of two of your whole trip.
>> It's frustrating because . . .
> Slow down a bit to create another buffer
> I think if you reflect a bit you'll find
The parent post does return to the psycho-emotional layer of the problem but on the whole the exchange brings to mind the "two movies, one screen" model of perennial problems. In many of the comments here some people emphasize the problem in terms of physics and some see the problem in terms of psychology (both have overlap and are valid).
A third perspective may be "game theory." I think the Prisoner's Dilemma [0] could explain some aspects of the physical/mental problem. In the set below, Driver A's strategy isn't dependent on a singular predictable Driver B but all drivers that may perform the role of Driver B during the course of a commute.
Agent Cooperate Defect
Driver A leaves space doesn't
Driver B^n merge stay
Leaving aside all times in which a Driver B must merge, such as lane ending zippers or merging to approach an exit lane, Driver B merges because there is some advantage to being in the lane of Driver A. If Driver A maintains space they will not just lose to one Driver B but to all Driver Bs.
I conjecture that this is a collective action problem and that above a certain traffic saturation point there must be a social taboo against changing lanes.
This is not to claim that individual perspective shifting is not important. I am reminded of Foster Wallace's Kenyon address "This is Water," [1] quoted below. However, the task of changing individual perspectives is vastly higher energy than the creation of a social taboo, which is why purity codes and other social inhibitors are so prevalent.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us
do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it
doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. [...]
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about
these kinds of situations. [...] [Maybe] the Hummer that just cut me off is
maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat
next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a
bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
No. That happens when people drive too close to each other and brake. Not when you let off the gas slightly to maintain a gap which prevents this exact thing.
The entire reason this happens is because 98% of people are morons who drive up the next guy's ass. If everyone kept a proper distance it wouldn't happen at all.
> someone is taking your safety buffer as their opportunity to travel faster
Nobody is 'taking' something; we're all just sharing the road, and at little cost. People change lanes for many reasons, and sometimes to pass someone else and travel faster. That's what the left lane (if we're talking about the US) is for.
> results in you having to travel slower and slower to maintain the gap that is constantly consumed,
I understand the theory but that hasn't happened in my experience.
And even if five or ten cars got in front of you, how much distance is that? A random Internet site says the average midsize car is 16 feet; add 220 ft safe driving distance at 75 mph (says another random website), so let's say 240 ft per car x 10 cars is 2400 ft. In that extreme circumstance, it will cost you ~30 seconds.
It's self-fulfilling: If you act aggressively toward other drivers, they will respond in kind. If you treat them respectfully and politely, they act the same way toward you. People behave well and kindly, naturally. We are social creatures.
Not to mention if that if somebody needs to come over, the proper thing to do is signal first. Then I'm happy to politely ease off a bit and open more space for them to come over safely.
It's the people who aggressively slide right over just a few feet in front of me (cutting off nearly all of my safety buffer) without so much as a signal that really drive me nuts.
In Austin too, and probably just caused a driver to think the same thing. They were in the left lane on a frontage road which was suddenly turning left even though there was an entire lane opposite the intersection blocked off by those plastic things that seem popular to randomly place in the road these days. I saw them hesitate and figured they wanted to merge right, so i decelerated a bit to add another car length or or so, at maybe 10-15mph. They had plenty of space, flipped on their blinker, and instead of just merging started slowing down, to which I decided I wasn't going to brake more to allow them to block myself and everyone else from rolling through the intersection. They basically stopped in their lane, and beeped as I rolled by, to which someone behind them beeped at them for blocking the lane.
In Austin if you want to merge, decide if you can, blink and then merge.
Don't expect people to stomp on their brakes and stop to let you in, especially if your already traveling slower than the lane you are trying to get into and decide to further slow yourself.
And if you can't merge, deal with it, exit, or miss your exit and go around. Next time you will be more prepared or you will learn how to properly merge.
My experience driving in MA and NY was similar, but so often it was because a rusted out shitbox was trying to merge in that would slow down traffic significantly, and not only put me at risk of rear ending them, but being rear ended myself.
When flows merge, there's turbulence. There's less turbulence if the flows are more closely matched, including speed.
In the UK we are taught that you should not signal until you are ready to manoeuvre. If you follow the rules exactly this can put you in the unfortunate position of being penned in behind shower traffic.
Unless I'm the last car in a line and there's plenty of open space behind me. Then you should just wait until after I've passed before merging, because otherwise you create a little ripple in the flow. A few ripples and you got a wave, and that's how you get traffic.
So for the love of gods, if you're merging, even if you signal, match speeds for merging. If you're too slow to match speed, then suck it up buttercup, and hang out in the right lane until there's an opening.
It seems like a tragedy, but actually it can be a boon as long as you travel in neither the leftmost nor rightmost lane. The majority of the traffic entering your buffer will be exiting your buffer out the other side as soon as they can, so you can just chug along at a (greatly reduced, but) consistent speed. Meanwhile, the traffic to either side of you is in standstill, paralyzed by your bow wake.
It's wild to me how often the left lane is not the fastest lane.
I've had times where the right lane ends up being the fastest. On I-5 near Woodburn, OR, it's 3 lanes. So many drivers, including truckers, will often stay out of the right lane entirely to avoid being caught up in traffic coming on/off. Meanwhile, the left lane is going 5 mph under the limit because there's a left-lane camper somewhere miles ahead. So I can fly past everybody in the right lane because there's actually barely any traffic coming on/off and everybody is avoiding the right lane for no reason at all.
The section of I-5 between Portland and Salem is absolutely psychotic, and I have never been able to reason out exactly why. It consistently has a left lane jammed with angry people going at or below the speed limit, a fairly normal center lane filled with cruisers, and a mostly empty right lane with the occasional big rig and regular very-high-speed cars expressing their frustration with the left lane by going 25+ mph over the limit in the right lane.
I know that's what you basically just said. Just venting. The driver behavior in that section of freeway confounds me, and I do not know what the underlying cause is. It is otherwise an unremarkable bit of interstate like any other.
The alternative is that you're stuck going 10+ mph under the limit because of a left lane hog.
Banning passing on the right only works if keep-right-except-to-pass laws exist and are thoroughly enforced. Most states in the USA don't have keep-right laws, and those that do, it's never enforced, so many people don't even know it's actually the law.
EDIT: US-26 westbound immediately outside downtown Portland is notorious for left lane campers. The limit is 50 mph, but without fail, there's some moron going 40 mph in the left lane. You wanna go slow? Fine, but do it in the right lane where you belong.
AFAIK all US states have some form of "keep right" or "slow poke" laws in various forms that distill down to keep right, except to pass.
So the laws do exist, they just are never enforced. Even when said left lane campers cruise by state patrol, I never see them stopped. Hell, I rarely see them stop people going 15+ over the limit either so not actually sure what they're doing.
Its not against the law in any US state (a quick search seems to back this up) to pass on the right. With one huge gotcha, it must be "safe" defined in various ways.
OTOH, most states have a stay right except to pass, slower traffic keep right laws.
Which means, that unless the person to your right is weaving through traffic, driving on the shoulder, or a few other bits of unsafe behavior, if someone passes you on the right your likely the one violating the law by not moving right when your not actively overtaking/passing someone.
There is not a single state in the USA where using the right lane to pass slower traffic in the left/center lanes is illegal. It is allowed everywhere.
It's not the fastest often because it's oversubscribed and people do not understand that the car has a 3rd, mostly underuntilized, state of neither pedal depressed (ie "coasting") ... so they create cascading braking pileups ...
To be fair, some (automatic) vehicles have such tall gearing that coasting will not slow you down if on a flat, let alone downhill. I've driven a few, and I can't stand them. You have no choice but to tap brakes.
I much prefer cars with short gearing for better engine braking. I continue to choose to drive a manual party for better engine braking.
So many people don't even use regular cruise control. They'll have nobody in front of them for miles and their speed yo-yos between 60 and 65 mph. And if you pass them because your cruise is set at 66 mph, they'll speed up to match, but then eventually decide to pass you, get in front, and slow back down to 60. The only way to end the stupid cycle is to go 70-75 mph until there's at least 1/4 mile between the two of you.
The adaptive cruise control in my Subaru rarely coasts. It isn't smart enough to see a gap slowly narrowing and start coasting, and it isn't confident enough to temporarily allow the gap to be smaller than the setpoint while it coasts to recover the gap. So it brakes and wastes energy, and I don't use it.
Truckers sometimes have a good reason to do that -- they can't brake or accelerate as quickly as a small vehicle, and thus can end up going very slowly if they stick with the right lane. To a driver going 3 exits down the 205 it's not a big deal, to a truck driver doing the same they may be at the end of a long haul up the I5 and every minute starts to count since it can affect their pay. And if you can avoid hard braking/hard acceleration in the right lane, that can help your fuel costs quite a bit since slowly coasting behind someone doing 5 under in the left lane is more efficient than jerking around in the right lane.
There are plenty of ramps on I5 and 205 that I merge to the left for because I know they will spill into the right and (when it exists) middle lanes. Because of how traffic also reacts to brake lights (some people brake too hard even when they have sufficient distance to let off the gas and coast to a slower speed) it seems like it ends up making my experience through those stretches a bit better.
Ultimately, any individual behaviour is largely irrelevant, it's what the whole mass of cars moving along does that affects things the most. Often you don't want to be the (significantly) odd one out regardless of the situation.
That's not a good reason, those truckers are just assholes. I'd like to see the authorities enforce the law and fine them heavily. Put them out of business.
I've done a few tours around the world on the interstate system, so I've seen my fair share of truckers. Yeah, some are assholes, but there are stretches and routes where their behaviour makes sense, even if I don't like it. It's on them for how they behave, but understanding why they behave that way can make it simpler to deal with them in real life. As real, squishy people, not a system of rules.
Would I love to see CHP or OHP fine every left lane trucker in the 'no trucks in left lane' zones? Hell yes, but until that happens, I understand the trucker behaviour.
Being a bit more nuanced, I dont mind a trucker in the left in a 2 lane section (they're likely trying to avoid bad interactions with merging cars from the right) ... but it does bother me when its 3+ .
This is what most frustrates me about driving in Florida. The right lane is nearly always the fast lane, yet is the lane with most 'events.'
When asked, they'll say they feel safer in the left lane because they don't feel safe having to deal with people turning out and merging. So you get instead people driving fast in the lane meant for pulling out and merging.
> as long as you travel in neither the leftmost nor rightmost lane
What I really hate, however, is that plenty of people will cruise in the center lane but still not leave a decent gap between them and the car in front. They effectively turn a three lane freeway into two one-lane freeways by hobbling the ability of anyone else to switch lanes. The freeway moves way smoother when there is a modest, predictable speed differential between each lane so that people can find their way into the next lane over without having to force the issue.
But you’re not getting slower and slower for every car. Lets say 100 cars pull in front of you, and let’s be say each car adds 5 metres of space, so you have 500 metres of ‘lost’ space to regain.
At over 100 km/h that would be ideally 5m for a car and 70m for a safe distance between each one so 7,5km, which is 4.5 minutes at 100 km/h or 9 minutes at 30 mph.
- Apathy is rampant in most workforces, presumably also teachers.
- In unionized workplaces where greater performance != greater pay, and greater pay is guaranteed regardless... No surprise there wasn't better outcomes.
- Not sure if this site has such a bent, but to me if the funding was going to rise 80% (twice as fast as inflation), it would have been nice to also see what market forces could have done via a voucher system.
> The situation of "kid running out between cars" will likley never be solved
Nuanced disagree (i agree with your physics), in that an element of the issue is design. Kids running out between cars _on streets that stack building --> yard --> sidewalk --> parked cars --> driving cars.
One simple change could be adding a chain link fence / boundary between parked cars and driving cars, increasing the visibility and time.
there's still an inlet and outlet (kinda like hotel pickup/drop off loops). It's not absolutely perfect, but it constrains the space of where kids can dart from every parked car to 2 places.
Also the point isn't the specifics, the point is that the current design is not optimal, it's just the incumbent.
Ok, that's not really a simple change anymore, because you need more space for that. Unless it's really just a drop off queue, but then it's not parked cars, since a parked car blocks the queue.
We would really need to see the site to have an idea of the constraints, Santa Monica has some places where additional roadway can be accomodated and some places where that's not really an option.
Meanwhile the news does not report the other ~7,000 children per year injured as pedestrians in traffic crashes in the US.
I think the overall picture is a pretty fantastic outcome -- even a single event is a newsworthy moment _because it's so rare_ .
> The NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation is investigating “whether the Waymo AV exercised appropriate caution given, among other things, its proximity to the elementary school during drop off hours, and the presence of young pedestrians and other potential vulnerable road users.”
Meanwhile in my area of the world parents are busy, stressed, and on their phones, and pressing the accelerator hard because they're time pressured and feel like that will make up for the 5 minutes late they are on a 15 minute drive... The truth is this technology is, as far as i can tell, superior to humans in a high number of situations if only for a lack of emotionality (and inability to text and drive / drink and drive)... but for some reason the world wants to keep nit picking it.
A story, my grandpa drove for longer than he should have. Yes him losing his license would have been the optimal case. But, pragmatically that didn't happen... him being in and using a Waymo (or Cruise, RIP) car would have been a marginal improvement on the situation.
Err, that is not the desirable statistic you seem to think it is. American drivers average ~3 trillion miles per year [1]. That means ~7000 child pedestrian injurys per year [2] would be ~1 per 430 million miles. Waymo has done on the order of 100-200 million miles autonomously. So this would be ~2-4x more injurys than the human average.
However, the child pedestrian injury rate is only a official estimate (it is possible it may be undercounting relative to highly scrutinized Waymo vehicle-miles) and is a whole US average (it might not be a comparable operational domain), but absent more precise and better information, we should default to the calculation of 2-4x the rate.
I suspect that highway miles heavily skew this statistic. There's naturally far fewer pedestrians on highways (lower numerator), people travel longer distances on highways (higher denominator), and Waymo vehicles didn't drive on highways until recently. If you look only at non-highway miles, you'll get a much more accurate comparison.
Then you or Waymo can meet the burden of proof and present that more precise and better information. There is little reason to assume against safety at this point in time except as a intellectual exercise for how more accurate information could be found.
Until then, it is only prudent to defer snap judgements, but increase caution, insist on rigor and transparency, and demand more accurate information.
> we should default to the calculation of 2-4x the rate.
No we should not. We should accept that we don't have any statistically meaningful number at all, since we only have a single incident.
Let's assume we roll a standard die once and it shows a six. Statistically, we only expect a six in one sixth of the cases. But we already got one on a single roll! Concluding Waymo vehicles hit 2 to 4 times as many children as human drivers is like concluding the die in the example is six times as likely to show a six as a fair die.
More data would certainly be better, but it's not as bad as you suggest -- the large number of miles driven till first incident does tell us something statistically meaningful about the incident rate per mile driven. If we view the data as a large sample of miles driven, each with some observed number of incidents, then what we have is "merely" an extremely skewed distribution. I can confidently say that, if you pick any sane family of distributions to model this, then after fitting just this "single" data point, the model will report that P(MTTF < one hundredth of the observed number of miles driven so far) is negligible. This would hold even if there were zero incidents so far.
Sure, but we shouldn't stretch the analogy too far. Die rolls are discrete events, while miles driven are continuous. We expect the number of sixes we get to follow a binomial distribution, while we expect the number of accidents to follow a Poisson distribution. Either way, trying to guess the mean value of the distribution after a single incident of the event will never give you a statistically meaningful lower bound, only an upper bound.
The Poisson distribution is well approximated by the binomial distribution when n is high and p is low, which is exactly the case here. Despite the high variance in the sample mean, we can still make high-confidence statements about what range of incident rates are likely -- basically, dramatically higher rates are extremely unlikely. (Not sure, but I think it will turn out that confidence in statements about the true incident rate being lower than observed will be much lower.)
Would this Waymo incident be counted as an injury? Sounds like the victim was relatively unharmed? Presumably there are human-driver incidents like this where a car hits a child at low speeds, with effectively no injuries, but is never recorded as such?
People's standards for when they're willing to cede control over their lives both as the passenger and the pedestrian in the situation to a machine are higher than a human.
And for not totally irrational reasons like machine follows programming and does not fear death, or with 100% certainty machine has bugs which will eventually end up killing someone for a really stupid reason—and nobody wants that to be them. Then there's just the general https://xkcd.com/2030/ problem of people rightfully not trusting technology because we are really bad at it, and our systems are set up in such a way that once you reach critical mass of money consequences become other people's problem.
Washington banned automatic subway train operation for 15 years after one incident that wasn't the computer's fault, and they still make a human sit in the cab. That's the bar. In that light it's hard not to see these cars as playing fast and loose with people's safety by comparison.
>People's standards for when they're willing to cede control over their lives both as the passenger and the pedestrian in the situation to a machine are higher than a human.
Are they? It is now clear that Tesla FSD is much worse than a human driver and yet there has been basically no attempt by anyone in government to stop them.
FSD is already better than at least one class of drivers. If FSD is engaged and the driver passes out, FSD will pull over to the side of the road and stop. And before we leap to conclusions that it only helps in the case of drunk drivers who shouldn't be driving in the first place (which, they shouldn't be), random strokes and seizures happen to people all the time.
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I saw a thing from HealthyGamerGG youtube[1] that he said one of the things about depression is that it causes/influences one to avoid the things that would make their life less depressing.
eg just to paint the picture: you're depressed so you don't get out of bed, therefore you don't go do your workout, therefore you lack endorphins and look in the mirror and see squishy, you're sad about how squishy you are and so you get more depressed. You're more depressed so you also don't do your dishes, when you do get out of bed you are depressed you feel like a slob and you're squishy, so you get more depressed...
Whereas adding anti-depressants, and other virtuous cycle things like vitD/O3, exercise et al. Give the boost necessary to _make your life less depressing_ ...
So if you know someone who's depressed, it might be helpful to help them make their life less depressing too. (in addition to all the best medical advice!)
[1]- he's a real Dr... Dr. Alok Kanojia (Dr. K), a Harvard-trained psychiatrist (MD, MPH) specializing in modern mental health
Careful, he is also a believer in Ayurveda[1]. Which basically basically categorizes people into different elements like fire and water and then tries to change their diet and habits to match their elemental style or something. You can hear him talking about it here [2]. Kinda reminds me of Humorism [3]. Dr. K seems like a nice enough guy but don't get too lured in by the "Harvard-trained" credentialism.
I agree there's nuance, but he's way above the "has a webcam and yeti blue" bar that most of youtube falls under, that was my point in putting his credential up. Not to rise him to a perfect status, but to not allow him being on youtube to fall to the minimum bar of youtube.
Definitely agree. He sometimes says things that sound interesting or true, but for the most part I believe he is full of it.
The field of psychology is barely removed from charlatanism anyway, having a diploma from Harvard doesn't change that.
Part of the issue is taking it's output as conclusion rather than as a signal / lead.
I would never let an LLM make an amputate or not decision, but it could convince me to go talk with an expert who sees me in person and takes a holistic view.
> The challenge is there really isn't a good way to incentivize that work.
What if we got Undergrads (with hope of graduate studies) to do it? Could be a great way to train them on the skills required for research without the pressure of it also being novel?
Those undergrads still need to be advised and they use lab resources.
If you're a tenure-track academic, your livelihood is much safer from having them try new ideas (that you will be the corresponding author on, increasing your prestige and ability to procure funding) instead of incrementing.
And if you already have tenure, maybe you have the undergrad do just that. But the tenure process heavily filters for ambitious researchers, so it's unlikely this would be a priority.
If instead you did it as coursework, you could get them to maybe reproduce the work, but if you only have the students for a semester, that's not enough time to write up the paper and make it through peer review (which can take months between iterations)
Unfortunately, that might just lead to a bunch of type II errors instead, if an effect requires very precise experimental conditions that undergrads lack the expertise for.
Could it be useful as a first line of defence? A failed initial reproduction would not be seen as disqualifying, but it would bring the paper to the attention of more senior people who could try to reproduce it themselves. (Maybe they still wouldn't bother, but hopefully they'd at least be more likely to.)
Most interesting results are not so simple to recreate that would could reliably expect undergrads to do perform the replication even if we ignore the cost of the equipment and consumables that replication would need and the time/supervision required to walk them through the process.
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