Everybody hates commuting, mostly because sitting in a steel box listening to podcasts while drinking mass-produced coffee is about the last thing anybody wants to do at 7am.
We’ve been blaming other drivers for years, and now, MIT has proven that you’re actually right. Every morning, a handful of jerks do exactly the wrong thing and trigger a massive domino reaction that screws it up for everybody else.
MIT researchers anonymously tracked drivers by following their cellphone signals across the Boston area. As drivers made calls, took texts, and did other things they shouldn’t actually being doing in a car, the MIT team tracked nearly a million drivers. They found that it wasn’t Boston’s allegedly awful roads or the complete inability of tourists to just stop whining and buy a GPS holding everybody up; it was traffic congestion on a few crucial roads:
The backups on these roads ripple outward, causing traffic to snarl across the Hub. By tracking the cell records, they found that it’s just a small number of drivers from a small number of neighborhoods who are responsible for tying up the key roads.
Specifically, they identified 15 census tracts (out of the 750 in Greater Boston) located in Everett, Marlborough, Lawrence, Lowell, and Waltham as the heart of the problem, because drivers from those areas make particularly intensive use of the problematic roads in the system.
If you’ve ever been to these towns, the fact that they’re a source of waste and relentless misery is about the least shocking thing you’ll read today.
MIT suggests that carpooling, better public transit, and community awareness will help, which is sensible and intelligent and also utterly adorable in how naive it is. No, guys, these people are going to keep using these roads until we thin the herd. Fortunately, Click and Clack are already building a Wicker Car to sacrifice a few unruly drivers to the traffic gods, so we should be good.
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Oooof course it is. 90% of the time that I pass someone who’s going slow and holding up traffic, it’s because they’re on their phones.
And my commute is almost entirely highway. No wonder I see an accident almost every day.
I don’t see where they blamed drivers using their phones. Only that they used cell towers to track individual drivers progress.
Don’t get me wrong. Whenever I see someone texting and driving, or worse, not getting through a traffic light because the dipshit infront of me didn’t see that the light had turned green, I feel compelled to ram them off the road. But that doesn’t seem to be the conclusion here.
It’s worse when they aren’t on their phones, cause then you can’t blame it on anything but sheer stupidity
It’s not even being on their phones: It’s the fact that they all use a handful of awful roads instead of finding an alternate route.
Oh. Huh.
BRB, more coffee.
Well if everyone else finds alternate routes, then I can keep using my regular roads, right?
Problem solved.
There’s a stretch of road on my commute home that has zero exits between where I get on and where I get off, yet it has a slight incline and slight curve. There is always a traffic slowdown due to that.
There was a thing I saw a few years back how a single person can prevent a traffic jam just by actually not slamming on their brakes but by doing a controlled slowdown while the traffic in front of them un-jams itself, but this needs you to not tailgate, good luck with that. They also did a test with 20 some cars going in a circle and told to maintain a steady 20 MPH. The moment someone braked to slow down it caused a massive chain reaction that caused every other vehicle to need to brake.
I was going to post the same thing. I beleive it was guy in Seattle who figured this out. I’ve tried it and it seems to actually work …
Here it is …
[amasci.com]
That’s is what I read. Thanks for the link!
Also…Boston roads are fucking terrible
Philly is about a thousand times worse, actually. But nothing beats the Southeast and it’s knife-edge merges. Whoever decided that a merge was nothing more than a right turn needs to be beaten and shot.
It boils down to there will always be people who suck at driving, who don’t have the presence of mind to pay the fuck attention. If it’s not phones it will be something else. In the pre-cellphone days I saw a guy playing his guitar while driving, a person reading a book, a woman with a cup of coffee in one hand and a curling iron in the other – I swear to God she was steering with her elbows – and every once in awhile she would take a swipe at her kids in the backseat with the curling iron. ALL of these instances were during the morning rush hour along 805 in San Diego.
So when I see a Cadillac commercial bragging about having an on board tablet interface-thingy, I just shudder at yet another distraction.
I might add all of the instances cited the cars were moving at a decent clip – it’s not like we were at a standstill at the time.
“listening to podcasts while drinking mass-produced coffee is about the last thing anybody wants to do at 7am.”
umm, that’s the ONLY thing i want to do at 7 am if sleeping isn’t an option
I Fucking KNEW IT!!
I actually work in Marlborough. I will confirm it is an awful town to drive through.