From a purely traffic load perspective, the whole “fast lane” thing doesn’t make a huge difference, and the aggressive obsession with it is actually a big part of the psychology which creates traffic in the first place. Traffic capacity is generally optimized when everyone is traveling close to the same speed and has enough following distance to safely maintain that speed, which is why speed limits are set for the slowest road users. Just in general, speed does not increase road capacity beyond a certain fairly low limit because it requires dramatically increased following distance, or in the absence of such responsible behavior, it massively increases the frequency of traffic disruption.
The worst case is a few people traveling much faster than the slowest road users, as these few users both take up more space, and cause more disruption. The “fast lane” concept is rooted firmly in an unfortunate behavioral reality and has basically no real scientific basis beyond that. Even if you had perfect robot drivers with perfect reaction time and the ability to see far ahead of themselves, the critical capacity speed only increases slightly because the maximum stoping distance is still limited by rubber and asphalt.
I’m a little confused about the mechanism of the speeders causing the disruption. Is it because when they cut in front of someone closely, it causes the driver to hit the brakes to make more room, thus triggering the chain reaction?
I’m genuinely curious: are there adverse effects to an arrangement where the right lane is used by large trucks going 90-100 kph, middle lanes used for normal traffic going 120-130 kph and the left lane kept open for faster traffic? As far as I understand, these issues arise when cars go back and forth between lanes all the time, or when cars go slower than the ones behind them without an open lane to overtake them. If you pick a lane and stay in it, you might cause the second issue
“Pick a lane and stay in it” leads to slow drivers blocking the left lane, no?
From a purely traffic load perspective, the whole “fast lane” thing doesn’t make a huge difference, and the aggressive obsession with it is actually a big part of the psychology which creates traffic in the first place. Traffic capacity is generally optimized when everyone is traveling close to the same speed and has enough following distance to safely maintain that speed, which is why speed limits are set for the slowest road users. Just in general, speed does not increase road capacity beyond a certain fairly low limit because it requires dramatically increased following distance, or in the absence of such responsible behavior, it massively increases the frequency of traffic disruption.
The worst case is a few people traveling much faster than the slowest road users, as these few users both take up more space, and cause more disruption. The “fast lane” concept is rooted firmly in an unfortunate behavioral reality and has basically no real scientific basis beyond that. Even if you had perfect robot drivers with perfect reaction time and the ability to see far ahead of themselves, the critical capacity speed only increases slightly because the maximum stoping distance is still limited by rubber and asphalt.
I’m a little confused about the mechanism of the speeders causing the disruption. Is it because when they cut in front of someone closely, it causes the driver to hit the brakes to make more room, thus triggering the chain reaction?
Thats a big part of it, yeah. Theres lots of really good comments about it in this thread.
You have demonstrated why fundamentally humans suck at driving and this problem is unsolvable.
Not because you asked the question but because it’s not intuitive why.
So long as this has to be explained to anyone it can’t be solved.
I’m genuinely curious: are there adverse effects to an arrangement where the right lane is used by large trucks going 90-100 kph, middle lanes used for normal traffic going 120-130 kph and the left lane kept open for faster traffic? As far as I understand, these issues arise when cars go back and forth between lanes all the time, or when cars go slower than the ones behind them without an open lane to overtake them. If you pick a lane and stay in it, you might cause the second issue