> He said the car in front of him almost hit the car so they swerved barely missing him and then there was the Tesla right there.
This is not a criticism of the driver, because everyone does it, but one of my pet peeves is hardly anyone follows at a safe distance. Most of the time you can’t even if you want to because someone will merge in front of you with that much space.
Everyone does it because the law isn't enforced, and because nobody is following the law enforcing it is seen as unreasonable.
On the spectrum between charging people for involuntary manslaughter for cases like this and saying "there's nothing they could have done" we are very far on the latter part of the spectrum.
Sure there is. Every driver has a duty to be able to stop in assured clear distance and to maintain proper lookout. The vehicle that struck the Tesla, breached these duties and is the proximate cause of the loss. Tesla/the driver of the Tesla, shares some contributory negligence for assumption of risk. 80% liability on the rear ending vehicle and 20%on the Tesla.
I saw someone was downvoted for calling you an asshole. I guess that doesn't really follow the spirit of HN, but it's crazy to me how much we have normalized driving dangerously as a society.
We have seemingly decided it's perfectly fine to drive in a way that puts others at risk of death or serious injury. It's to the point that if you call someone out on it, like the other commenter did, you're the one in the wrong. Yet they were just calling out a person for putting other people's lives at risk. We should be condemning driving like this, just like we condemn many other activities that put other's lives at risk.
There is some ambiguity in jhoechtl's comment. It isn't clear if they are saying they choose to routinely ignore the warning, or if they are saying that they would have to ignore the warning in order to routinely follow too closely and end up in a situation like was being discussed.
One of the site guidelines is to interpret a comment in the best possible way, so I am choosing to interpret it as the latter.
Until you realize being cut off doesn’t actually impact you much so you play a much safer game of giving everyone a wide enough berth to act like an idiot and not ruin your day. Driving habits are extremely psychologically interesting, from road rage at a stranger who did something you didn’t like to people feeling compelled, and indeed proud, of unsafe driving habits that put multiple lives at risk to save a couple minutes on a trip. An argument could be made that curing these tendencies would stand to save more lives then almost any other mass behavioral correction (saving maybe dietary choices).
Absolutely. In the context of high way driving especially with its high speeds, the slight slowing down to maintain follow distance even if people were constantly moving in is negligible to the overall trip time, and it’s highway driving where that follow distance is the most critical to saving lives.
If people sat down with the numbers and realized how little that slight slowing down in the moment someone moves in front of them impacts their trip time, how little it matters to the original trip time that someone passed them, the roads would be a lot safer, less stressful, and faster overall.
If everyone slowed down, there would be far more congestion backing up due to reducing the throughput of the road.
I would argue that the people driving at distances closer to the car in front of them are reducing congestion by increasing the throughput of the road. Obviously this is mitigated by decreased throughput due to increased probability of collisions.
But if EVERYONE drove such that they could fully stop if the car in front do them fully stopped, you would have a public uproar over how much backed up traffic there was.
There road is basically constantly in flux and politicians could enforce minimum driving distances very easily with cameras and drive down collisions, but it would be massively unpopular and they would get voted out immediately. I presume that is why we already do not have speed cameras in the US.
It would be trivial to fine everyone breaking the speed limits. Or even driving too close to each other. For a tolled road, you can get go back however many years you want and retroactively fine people for going past the speed limit based on toll time stamps. But I figure the lack of this happening means the public wants to make this risk vs convenience trade off.
> If everyone slowed down, there would be far more congestion backing up due to reducing the throughput of the road.
This isn't true. The greater the following distance, the more time a driver has to respond. More time to respond means fewer and gentler inputs. In turn, this reduces propagation to following vehicles, and as a result traffic moves faster. It's the difference between turbulent and laminar flow.
> I figure the lack of this happening means the public wants to make this risk vs convenience trade off.
Joe Public has never sat down to think this through, nor is he qualified to do so.
Joe Public decides this by demanding their politicians to not enforce speed limits. A campaign would be dead in the water the second it talks about having cops issue more speeding fines or install speed cameras or using toll times stamps to issue fines. The US public is not sufficiently scared of injury or death from collisions to make it a political priority.
> In turn, this reduces propagation to following vehicles, and as a result traffic moves faster. It's the difference between turbulent and laminar flow.
And in turn, this decreases the rate at which vehicles enter the highway, which backs up onto the streets that lead to the highway.
There are several major traffic accidents in Atlanta every morning during rush hour on the most important arteries. Most of these are probably caused by tailgating or aggressive behavior during merging. They turn a 30 minute commute into a 90 minute commute if any lanes remain open.
I can’t imagine that the downstream effects of maintaining a safe following distance and permitting people to merge would cause anywhere near the inconvenience of these daily, destructive events.
There are varying levels of safe driving distance. You can drive close enough to the car in front of you such that you can slow down quickly enough if they slow down from 70mph to 50mph, or if they slow down 70mph to 10mph, but gradually.
You can also drive further back such that you can slow down if the car in front slams on their brake and comes to a complete stop. This is the distance I am referring to which would be politically unpalatable to enforce.
I agree that people weaving in and out and tailgating and cutting people off are doing more harm than justified, but it all starts getting murky once the road hits capacity limits and people start trying to figure out the best way to optimize their travel times. Eventually, with enough congestion, the situation will deteriorate from stop and go traffic to crawling traffic to downtown Manahattan to Delhi and so on.
I think that's an extremely suspect hypothesis. Most congestion is caused by:
- Construction
- Accidents
- Directly counter to your point: people driving like assholes and cutting others off or forcing others to take abrupt maneuvers that then cascade through the tightly packed traffic
Slow speeds and ample space do not cause congestion, changes in the flow of traffic do, and usually those are caused by people following too close and making sudden maneuvers. If enough space is given and the flow of traffic is not disrupted you could go as fast as you want with as many cars as you want and not experience congestion.
It's the mentality you're espousing here that I find so fascinating about road travel. There appears to be such dissonance that one will justify speeding or tailing or road rage in all kinds of ways.
Too many cars on a certain section of the road at a certain point in time is congestion. This can be caused by many things, such as roadwork, collisions, but more often than not, it is simply a result of lots of people wanting to drive in the same direction on the same road at the same time. Aka rush hour.
I am not justifying road rage or tailgating. I am explaining that it is inevitable once the road gets close to carrying capacity, which can only be increased in the immediate term by driving faster and/or decreasing the distance of gaps between cars.
You say you're not justifying tailgating, but it sounds like your prescription for rush hour is exactly that.
I suppose there are different characteristics in different types of congestion. Stop and go congestion is usually caused by disruptions to the flow of traffic, while slower than usual congestion is indeed caused by over-capacity as you indicate. Just moving slower would be all such times would experience if not for people tailing and cutting others off, leading to the stopping part.
Even moving slower will not prevent stop and go traffic if the road has reached its capacity, due to the various different accelerations and decelerations of cars.
My overarching point is something like this video:
There simply is not a way to avoid the consequences of being near or above a road’s capacity. Of course, I recommend everyone to play it safe and stay far enough back to avoid any liability of being too close to the car in front. But the reality is we make lots of calculations and choices in driving and at various times, we choose farther distances and other times nearer distances (even though we know it is riskier) and these collective decisions will propagate down through the whole road.
> due to the various different accelerations and decelerations of cars.
Right, changes to the flow of traffic.
> There simply is not a way to avoid the consequences of being near or above a road’s capacity.
I agree, that is a valid bullet point. But that is certainly not the only cause of congestion, and driving aggressively in congestion and attempting to justify it by keeping the roads clearer doesn't hold a lot of water I don't think.
But I see you're saying you're not advocating unsafe driving so that's good, and I take your greater point, thanks for expounding on it.
You're doing static analysis on a dynamic situation. The biggest issue with overcapacity is the start of compression waves of traffic, which are generated much sooner by tailgaters slamming on their brakes in a panic with each following vehicle having to brake harder than the one in front, eventually coming to a complete stop (or just causing an accident).
As soon as someone crashes, that congestion is going to go way up. In very specific conditions where a road is congested already, slowing down does cause a cascading effect, BUT, if everyone is already maintaining a proper follow distance, it takes longer for the road to reach max congestion in the first place. Consider it like a bunch of springs all lined up spring wise; if you have the same number of springs, and you’re trying to insert a new spring (someone is merging), the springs which were less compressed will more easily accept a new spring, while the ones where are already compressed will experience more strain.
And imo, I’d rather be going slow because “we’re going the follow distance” than going slow because “someone went too fast in an unsafe condition and crashed (or worse)”. In the face of sheer car volume, we’re all going slow(er, though note that we’re usually still getting there faster than a horse would have) pretty much no matter what, might as well be safe while doing it.
> BUT, if everyone is already maintaining a proper follow distance, it takes longer for the road to reach max congestion in the first place.
I do not think this is a realistic model of the way roads work due to rush hours and sudden increases in demand. The ideal rules are great for when demand ebbs and flows gradually, but things change when everyone wants to be on the road between 8AM and 8:30AM. Then, you can have all the protocols you want, but the system has reached max capacity and there is no avoiding that other than dealing with the consequences (congestion -> stop and go traffic -> gridlock) and of course a collision or two.
I am not saying this justifies driving like a maniac and cutting people off. I simply expect people to act a certain way over the boundary conditions of a situation are approached, and I will not expect it to be the same as how they act when we are not pushing the limits.
> Until you realize being cut off doesn’t actually impact you much
I keep a long distance, and I drive fast. Germany, so fast means actually fast. My large safety margin means I have to keep braking because slower cars move past me and into my safety margin. Then, once the original blockage in front of me is cleared, I have to pass all those slower idiots who just overtook me again.
If driving wasn’t such a rare occurrence (usually 3-4 times a year) for me, I’d probably stop keeping a large safety distance like every other asshole.
Granted, race car drivers who think distance is measured in centimeters are even worse.
Frankly it's fine to create enough gap that people are passing in front of you.. My response is usually to widen the gap even more. It actually has the effect of helping to smooth traffic, reducing traffic jams.
You are also reducing throughput, and causing more congestion behind you. There is no having our cake and eating it too. Once a road hits maximum capacity at the safest distance gaps between cars, the only way to increase the road capacity is to reduce the distance gaps between cars.
In addition to increasing the gap, you have to drive steadily, with no braking. This makes you become the most predictable car on the road, people behind you can follow steadily instead of constantly accelerating & braking. This leads to reduced congestion.
There is no steady in high congestion areas with lots of on and off ramps. The rules are nice when there is no congestion and plenty of room to spread out, but the problems are inevitable at rush times or at chokepoints.
Not all congestion are created by those chokepoints. It's created because someone at some point hit the brakes, and then cars behind get into a pattern of accelerating & braking constantly until the congestion resolves. Steady driving with lots of gaps helps resolve this faster and prevent congestion in general.
unless you do this in the left lane or something, it probably doesn't change throughput that much or at all. A major cause of traffic jams is cascades of braking, so leaving a safe distance allows for coasting instead of overreacting to brake lights, and prevents a traffic jam. You can get higher capacity temporarily, but eventually by reducing distance, you just cause a jam that destroys throughput.
> It actually has the effect of helping to smooth traffic, reducing traffic jams.
I hear this a lot from people who practice this sort of driving, but don't the simulations suggest that the opposite is true, traffic actually improves when drivers are more aggressive?
Having cars be "aggressive" in this context basically means they flow into the voids more readily.
An example would be moving left into a "this would be an impolite move in any other context" sized cap between two cars to in order to let someone merge and then getting right back out of the lane.
When I moved to Boston, the first lesson I learned was any gap in front of me that can fit a car will soon have one there. I think it is big cities in general not just regions.
It is not big cities per se, it is any road that has surpassed carrying capacity. Obviously, this will be seen more in areas more densely populated with cars relative to road capacity.
If you drive in south or east Asia, you will see what naturally happens when the number of vehicles on the path greatly exceed the capacity of the path traveling at a certain speed. You can basically model it as fluid dynamics at a certain point in places like Mumbai and Bangkok.
I once took a defensive driving class, and the teacher's primary point throughout the whole thing is the only area of your car you have control over is the area in front of you. You obviously can't control whether people are beside you or not. You can't stop the person behind you from tailgating. All you can really do is ensure you have adequate space in front of you to respond to events.
You don't have complete control of what's behind/beside you but you have some control.
Maintaining situational awareness of these areas and adjusting your behavior to coax other traffic to behave in a way that is best/easiest/safest/whatever-ist for everyone is a prerequisite to being a "good" driver IMO.
Unless it is just heavy traffic, I constantly tweak my speed and following distance to avoid driving in other driver's blind spots and ideally not be driving beside them.
My driver's ed teacher said a similar thing about right of way - you never /have/ right of way, you are given it. I try to drive defensively, but it's a challenge when others are able to choose not to in ways that affect my driving.
>This is not a criticism of the driver, because everyone does it,
It is a valid criticism of the driver and not everyone does it. It is a major problem that so many people treat safe following distances as great places to cut someone off to save .05 seconds on their commute while risking the lives of others.
You can count lines at the side of the road? I’ve never found it particularly hard to silently count to two. If someone merges in front we just slow down a bit and repeat the excercise.
This does happen, but I find it doesn't result in me getting to my destination any slower.
If someone merges close in front of me, I reduce my speed by 5 mph or so for as long as I need, probably usually around 10-20 seconds, until there's an adequate gap again. Often someone will pull into that gap within a few mins, and I do the same thing. Overall it reduces my average speed by an imperceptible amount. It might add up to a couple minutes over a several hour journey, but I take that as worth it for being less likely to rear end someone.
Additionally, it really only happens in dense traffic when in the outside lane to exit the highway. When you're in the fastest moving lane and keeping up with traffic, few drivers are going to over/undertake you just to get into the gap. More typically they'll overtake the car in front of you too so it's not a problem.
Admittedly most of my driving is in UK and NW Europe rather than the US. US drivers seem a lot more suicidal and US highways tend to be less predictable by design.
In my experience, tailgaters are never satisfied by the speed of the car in front of them. The only good play is to leave enough space in front to stop without getting rear-ended.
In Atlanta, people will tailgate in spite of a wide open lane to the left and the driver in front going the speed of the road. I’m not going to tailgate the person in front of me just because the person behind me is tailgating.
Yeah, tailgating the person in front of me because the person behind me is tailgating has always felt like a: "well, now I have two problems" kind of situation.
If someone is tailgating me, I purposefully slow down, to 10-15% below the speed limit. If someone is determined to crash into my car, I prefer them to do so at as low a speed as I can get.
I drove a rental a year or so ago, and it had adaptive cruise control. This is where it would be like cruise control, except it would slow down if a car in front of you was going slower, and adjust the car speed to match their speed.
I'd never seen this before. I found that I couldn't really use it, because the distance you could set for it to follow the car in front of you was too close for my taste. I found you could decrease the distance by quite a bit, but I wasn't able to increase it to what I wanted.
Which brand was it? The ones I've seen adapt to the speed, so 2 bars in the cruise control adjustment means a certain distance at 100 km/h, and a longer distance at 130.
This is not a criticism of the driver, because everyone does it, but one of my pet peeves is hardly anyone follows at a safe distance. Most of the time you can’t even if you want to because someone will merge in front of you with that much space.