• Landless2029@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    One interesting about speeding in traffic. Often you’re rushing just to stop.

    It’s been proven that if you cap the max speed in heavy traffic everyone gets through it faster. Less stop and go with merges and guesses.

    Think of all the times someone sped up to prevent you from changing lanes? Or someone blocks you during a zipper merge.

    Traffic wouldn’t suck as much if people didn’t suck. I can’t wait until a few decades from now we’ve got AI cars Managing it for us.

    • rmuk@feddit.uk
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      9 months ago

      Variable speed limits just keep the road ticking over and they’re great. In the UK there were a bunch of highway improvements being rolled out, like reversible lanes, traffic flow monitoring and, yes, full-time variable speed limits and they all worked really, really well. But they also got rid of the hard shoulder (refuge lane) and the whole thing was collectively referred to as “smart motorways”. Needless to say that lots of people were injured or killed by the lack of hard shoulders, so now the government is poised to announce a rollback of all the smart motorway measures, including the absolutely superb variable speed limits.

      • CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        Ah yes, the all-or-nothing approach, typical anglosphere reaction to a problem.

        Canada does this shit too, it is infuriating.

      • Landless2029@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I’m citing the Smart motorways in my response but I forgot my source.

        I also didn’t know about the shoulders. Thank you