Traffic Waves

Dear Aggressive Drivers,

I sit on the 9th floor of my office building. For some reason, I am told I am extremely lucky to be assigned a window office, with a view of I-10 Westward into Katy. The eastbound (toward downtown) lanes of this monolithic highway are just 100 yards away from the office building.

Because I get to work around 7:30am, I get to see people commuting to downtown from 7:30 - about 9:00am each morning. Most of the time the traffic seems to be going around 40-50 mph, but sometime the cars come to a standstill in every lane. Yesterday morning, I glanced over to see a car merge terribly (probably without a blinker), which caused the cars behind to have to swerve and slam on the breaks. This caused a huge traffic jam, even though no accident had occurred.

What was interesting is that the traffic acted as a "wave," propagating backward. What I mean is that on I-10, at some point there was a line of cars that slowed down across all lanes of trafiic. Naturally the cars behind them had to slow down as well, causing the people behind them to slow, etc, etc. The first line of cars then started to speed up again, and then the next line sped up and so on. So from where I looked from above this debacle, it looked as if there was a slow moving, higher density mass of cars moving backwards along the highway. Very interesting.

As I continued to glance every once in a while, it was cool to see these traffic waves propagate down the highway. Almost beautiful, except for the fact that it was a big mass of commuting, polluting cars that caused the phenomena.

It made me realize that a lot of traffic is caused by aggressive driving, you. You want to go where you want to go as fast as possible, and no one is more important than you. If you can merge into a lane and get one or two more cars ahead, even though you are being dangerous and aggressive, you will. Your action creates traffic, which will make commutes for everyone longer. The problem is that you, as an aggressive driver, do not care about this because the traffic that you create will not affect you. What will affect you is the aggressive driver ahead of them that pulls the same stupid move and causes traffic for them (I also find that slow moving traffic makes everyone more aggressive, exacerbating the problem). You, aggressive driver, are too stupid to figure out that IF the whole culture of trying to get to your location as fast as possible, no matter what, was eliminated, then they would actually get to their destination faster.

This seems counterintuitive at first, but trust me it's true. Traffic is caused by fluctuations, which are caused by aggression. If everyone would go a common speed, everyone would get home faster.

I think this is the same reason people get so irate about bicycles riding in the road. It causes their car journey to be 10-30 seconds longer than it would be otherwise, and so they think it is appropriate to put the cyclist's life in danger.

So, drivers of fury, please be kind and considerate to yourself and others, and drive with less aggression. Thanks,

Me