Screenshot of a reddit post
see what you need is an extra lane there
I swear bro just one more lane it’ll fix all your traffic issues just one more bro please
One of my favorite traffic hacks. Google maps would never recommend it, but it is faster.
What’ll really blow your mind is that all you’re doing is navigating a really weird traffic circle. The more direct ramps are really just slip lanes (optimizations) for said circle.
Give em the old three leaf clover skidoo ☘️
Everyone commuting at the same time is borked. Drive around a 3 AM, there’s no traffic. It’d be better if we pushed for shifts that don’t NEED to be 9 AM to 5 PM out towards a different time like 6 AM to 2 PM.
What’s “borked” is that we all conform to a weird strict standard of all leaving/returning at the same hour.
How would you ever coordinate with friends and family though if one is you is always working? This is something I distinctly remember from the bad old days of shift work. It’s so much easier when you and your friends can all pretty reliably be expected to be available in the evenings or on the weekend…
I think this is less and less of an issue anyway as telecommuting becomes more and more viable. Now companies fighting that is an arbitrary cultural norm holding us back.
Ah, that’s the beauty of getting older: eventually you have no friends or family.
Tabletop gaming has solved that problem for me and might also explain my sensitivity to working around scheduling issues lol.
I mean yeah but we still find a time like once a month we both have a saturday off or something. I think the much bigger inconvenience is always having to miss work no matter what for a doctors appointment or something like that because they’re all like 9-5 too.
That’s mostly an issue with poor labor laws not allowing for time off when you should really have it, though.
It still sucks i want to work my work hours that’s why i took this job, i dont want to have to miss a day for a routine appointment, i want my pto for fun things, not errands that feel like work but i dont get paid.
Again, that’s a labor law thing though. You absolutely should not need to use PTO for a doctor/dental appointment. In most countries in Europe, that doesn’t use your PTO… you just get a doctor’s note and you get paid. There aren’t even a set number of days. You just get it written off.
I do get the pain, but I think there are more societal benefits to having common days and times off for most jobs though (obviously not possible for all).
You mean when manufacturing works?
to be 9 AM to 5 AM
I know this is a typo but I found it hilarious to think you were recommending 20 hour shifts as an improvement.
Yea it’s 4 AM where I am and I haven’t slept well for two days in a row due to financial stress.
I don’t, my day us shifted, so I commute later, instead of like an hour and a half my commute is 50 minutes (which is still a lot for a European) but in exchange I live in my hometown
Yea that’s exactly what I’m talking about, you’re saving like an hour a day simply by commuting at a slightly different time, AND you’re not contributing to peak traffic hours.
Years ago I worked with a guy who had a roughly 20 mile commute that was about 19 miles on a major highway that choked during rush hour. He worked from home in the early morning then drove in starting after 10:00. He’d then head home around 6:00 PM or later. He said traffic was almost always light.
He also never listened to traffic reports on TV or the radio. One day he got on the highway and was surprised to find traffic was virtually non-existent. He got about half way to the office to find the highway had been completely shut down due to a fuel tanker that was on fire…
One word answer: families.
Families is actually usually the reason for people to push for this, as having one parent for sending the child off and one for picking them up is often necessary if both parents wants to work full time
So one goes like 6 to 14 and the other does their 8 to 16 shenanigans
Yea, schedule is still mostly to blame, just think about how empty the streets are for many hours a night, or very little traffic at 11 AM or 2 PM. This is why I’m doing everything I can to try to avoid getting stuck commuting at normal times. I’d rather have a job that starts at 6 AM and ends at 2 PM.
Oh, you can drop your toddler off at daycare at 5 AM? Are your tweens fine readying themselves for school without any adults at home?
A car-centric society is the problem. The need to commute by car, both for the kids and the adults, is the problem.
I worked 6a-6p (3.5 days a week) with a toddler as a single mom, and daycare options were super limited. There was a whole two places available, could only use licenced in-home daycare folks.
I loved the schedule though. I did feel like someone elsecwas raising my kid on work days though.
commuting was easy peasy too
So then ask, why does a car-centric society exist in the first place. It stems from the decision of many to live in giant houses, where everyone needs their own back yard. From zoning laws and the need to live somewhere far from work. It’s deeply ingrained in the US, which is why remote work is the fastest solution, but many corporations refuse for control.
It’s what we got, so it must reflect what people wanted, right? Wrong. The reason that the U.S. is full of car-centric suburbia is that local leaders wanted to keep Black people out.
Not even kidding or exaggerating. My house is a little newer, but houses either direction down my street had racially-restricted covenants in the deeds. Many of them still say that you can’t sell to Black people, though those clauses were struck down by the courts, and are unenforceable.
But once de jure housing segregation became impossible, they adopted poverty as a proxy: Drive up the cost of houses by making the minimum lot size big, with big lawns. Set the maximum occupancy low, usually single-family, so poor people couldn’t double up. Make cars the only way to get around, because that costs more, and the automakers were all on-board. Then, subsidize white families through the original GI Bill, and FHA-backed, low-interest mortgages (a.k.a. red-lining).
This may sound like conspiracy thinking, but it’s not. This was explicitly the plan. The leaders said so, in public, even wrote it down. The simple reason that we have big lawns and big cars engrained in American culture: racism.
One might think, yes, but cars were still what Americans wanted, but shockingly, no, we didn’t. There were anti-car protests as late as the 1950’s! It was a concerted propaganda campaign by the automakers to break down the opposition. They worked hard to re-frame streets as space for cars, and people as the interlopers. (They invented the conceit of jaywalking, for instance, and put out safety films about looking both ways before crossing the street.) Again, we have the memos that they wrote to each other as proof that this was an explicit, deliberate goal. To sell more cars
So, the idea that we have cars because Americans love cars proves that old joke about the KGB agent chatting with the CIA agent about propaganda: Ours is so effective, we no longer even recognize it as propaganda. (That, and we’re so alienated from our emotions that many people think that they enjoy driving, despite all of the obvious signs that it makes them miserable.)
It stems from auto companies systematically destroying public transit across the country.
Edit: nvm, apparently I misunderstood the meaning of “tween”
Are your tweens (as in 20-something year olds) living with you and attending middle school? 😄 I would hope they can ready themselves just fine.
Guess you meant children or young teens
Tween means pre-teen…
Oh. TIL
That’s called night shifts, and they actually weigh more heavier on the human psyche because humans are not typically nocturnal. The most thing I can actually state is that peopel should have more HOV Lanes like they do for Houstonians who live outside of Downtown Houston. But the problem is that HOV lanes have people who don’t actually know how to drive the exact speed limit and those who do cause accidents.
Not really, night shifts are like 8 PM to 4 AM. I’m talking about a shifted schedule where people leave just 1 hour earlier to avoid the worst of traffic, and thus efficiency improves considerably. Most jobs could be worked from 6 AM to 2 PM instead of 9 AM to 5 PM.
Wouldn’t work. We’re familiar with the idea of induced demand spatially, as in building more lanes generates worse traffic congestion, but it would work temporally, too. Make more road capacity available by using the lanes we have at different times, and they’d just generate traffic congestion at different times.
By the way, I read recently that Houston no longer has a rush hour. It’s just congested through the whole day, now.
Hov lanes help because all the dumbasses take it and the local lanes become a lot easier to navigate lol
Have you ever met anyone who isn’t you?
Ah youre the guy in the hov getting pissed theyre getting passed by everyone in the local lanes lmao
we all conform to a weird strict standard of all leaving/returning at the same hour.
That darn circadian rhythm, am I right?
It’s fine it’s fine I just get neither enough sleep nor the ability to go to things on weekdays
One of the interchange ramps on my commute home regularly slows to stop and go due to lane changes. There is an on ramp followed by an off ramp a mile later. They share a lane. Cars entering the freeway, cars exiting the freeway, and cars on the freeway all fight for space. And I live in a relatively affluent area (or rather a very stratified area) so lots of people have newer model cars with automatic cruise control that quickly fills gaps and and then hard brakes when people enter the freeway. It’s a shitshow.
Anyway, I’ve learned that by exiting the freeway a mile early, entering downtown, doing a full circle on a round about, and reentering the freeway allows me to skip that mile or so of hostile traffic. I log my mileage and I have found the longer route actually burns less fuel, even.
Isn’t there this paradoxical thing that additional roads can lead to longer travel times for everyone? I think it has something to do with things like these. I guess there was a veritasium episode about it.
Three factors for this that I’m aware of:
- The whole road system needs to be able to handle the throughput from all sources to all destinations in aggregate. That means if you relieve one bottleneck, it increases the rate that traffic can reach the roads on the other side of the former bottleneck, which can cause them to exceed capacity. Eg, if you have a 5 lane highway reduce to 3 lanes and jams frequently form at (and leading up to) the lane reduction sites, traffic will likely flow ok in those 3 lanes and then really open up if it goes to 4. But if they extend the 5 lanes to where it goes to 4, there will now likely be a jam where traffic used to flow decently where it was 3 lanes, and that “really opens up” also gets downgraded to “flows decently”.
- Intersections are horrible once the exceed capacity, especially if there’s any potential for starvation in the way they cycle, as that can result in not just a jam but grid lock. Starvation in this context means a vehicle never gets their turn to proceed through the intersection in the way they desire. People waiting for their turn that will never come back up as more queue up and eventually start blocking the other paths through the intersection and other intersections leading there start also seeing starvation and eventually you need a person to go direct traffic to get things flowing again. Grid lock is when all paths get starved and will just continue backing up until everyone who wants to go to the gridlocked area is stuck in traffic that isn’t moving at all. It’s also why it’s illegal to stop inside an intersection because then you start starving any lanes you block. Anyways, adding a new road or lanes can suddenly cause an intersection downroad to exceed capacity.
- More onramps/offramps on a highway increase turbulence as people need to change lanes, especially in those cases where the lane you enter on immediately exits, as you get both people wanting to join and leave that lane in a short area. Turbulence creates traffic waves as traffic alternates between slowing down as people are forced to brake for lane changers having trouble moving over, and the slowdown effectively increases the road capacity (ahead of it, behind it has effective reduced capacity), so those at the front can immediately speed up, but since these affect different lanes at different rates, the lane weavers try to move to the fastest lanes and create more turbulence, sometimes it all adds up to bring some of the traffic to a complete stop. The same thing happens when people try to skip the queue and force their way into the backed up lane at the last moment.
Asshole drivers make bad traffic situations way worse than they need to be. But road systems are a lot more complex than they seem to be. It’s like fluid dynamics but even more complex because each driver has a different will (and agression, competence, etc) and it’s several ton vehicles that break if they touch each other acting as the basic particles instead of particles that usually move past each other relatively easily.
Induced demand.
Its similar to this
1865
The Jevons paradox (pronounced /ˈdʒɛ.vənz/, JEV-ənz) or Jevons effect is an economic phenomenon said to occur when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource’s use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource.[1][2][3][4] Greater efficiency reduces the amount of the resource needed per application, lowering its effective cost; if demand is sufficiently price elastic, this induces demand, frequently resulting in a net increase of total resource consumption
I found it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess's_paradox
It’s more about everyone trying to use their best route which might might be inefficient for the whole system, as OPs example nicely shows.
is this any different to the rebound effect, or are they both describing the same phenomenon in different ways?
I dont think so, people just tailgate too much so they cant handle a little traffic, just go the long way and skip everyone else in the conga line not realizing a conga line moves very slowly.
The clover interchange is the most cursed interchange, and also the most common because it’s relatively cheap.
It’s common in areas where there’s a lot of undeveloped land when it’s built.
Otherwise it’s the most expensive by far because it takes a fuckton of land.
Fair, yeah. The construction is less expensive because it only requires one bridge/overpass. Actually, I think the diverging diamond interchange may actually be cheaper, partly becuase of the smaller footprint but also even without considering land costs. But those are not common and can be confusing for people unfamiliar with them (you have to actually cross oncoming traffic and drive across the bridge on the “wrong” side). But they are cheaper, generally safer despite the crossover and far more efficient. And as far as I know, they will work anywhere the clover works. Maybe they’ll stop using those abominations.
Ugh, clovers. Giving me trauma to living in San Jose and the clover that merges 101 and 880.
The two most congested and largest freeways. Let’s have all the traffic entering have to fight with all the traffic exiting in about 100 ft of road.
You’d literally have people blocking the far left lanes and essentially making “right turns” across the all lanes. I hated them at first. But, honestly, you learn quickly that it’s just all lanes of traffic fighting and that’s just one method of getting through. It’s not even faster because all lanes are just blocked at that point.
Fuck cars. But clover interchanges are a special kind of stupid.
Worst part. I took the Cal train to SF to avoid traffic. But this was a road block between my house and the train station. It was anywhere from 30-60 minutes of driving in rush hour. It was a 5 minute drive when there was no traffic at night.
Just absolute insanity.
Clovers work well if there’s like 3 cars using it at any given point in time.
Texas had to go one better – inverted cloverleafs (stack interchanges) complete with service (frontage) roads
Dude, I have driven through Texas. I forgot about those. It’s like someone created a merge and thought “who should yield? Eh, we’ll never have enough cars for that to matter.”
Hah yeah we do this going from 101 to 880 north pretty often and it’s wild how much time it can shave. That entire interchange is the worst designed I’ve seen.
Yeah, why are clovers so wide-spread over there? We have almost none here.
Because we built the highways in one shot in the 50s and have just now started questioning if there are better designs
City I used to fly into for work eventually rebuilt an intire intersection (pretty major one for the area) to remove it. Had to be a real bitch to do. It was a huge upgrade.
Wasn’t a giant concrete monstrosity, which I’d imagine would be worse.
Ah yes the classic, “pro gamer move.”
To turn left onto my local stroadway it’s often faster to go straight, make a u-turn and a right turn because the left turns are advance green only. The main green is 5x longer so inevitably a bunch of people are just stopped with no cars going through the intersection.
I used to go to work along a road that had a two-lane roundabout. One lane turns left and one lane turns right (in this country, we drive on the left for context)
The left lane was always banked up many many cars, but the right lane wasn’t.
So I’d go bomb down in the right lane and do a 270 degree turn to end up going left, where the banked-up left-turning cars had to yield to me.
That’s a pro gamer move.
Driving is such a zero sum game… yeah, who knew that cutting everybody off (legally) would make travel time shorter for you and longer for everybody else.
Not hating on you, hating on this whole concept of being trapped in a car to go to work turning off everyone’s sense of humanity and community.
Why’d they build those useless blobby green barriers everywhere in the top right? They should clearly have added another lane or two to the red route.
Some woke Joni Mitchell communist plot.
It annoys me that there is no fourth ring in the north east corner.
I understand why. You do not need to explain it to me. It’s still annoying.
Does this help? You better now?
…yes mum thx mum
I understand why
I don’t :(
Edit: I mean I see the other long sweepy road for northbound to turn left, but why is that like that but clovers for the other three directions to turn left?
I think because it was intended to handle more traffic west and south, so they get long sweepy bends. Those have added lanes so they don’t even merge.
Roads??? Where we’re going we don’t need roads!!!
drives on all that empty green lawn
Its because of the change in elevation. Map != Territory
