There are phantom traffic jams where someone breaks hard and it ripples on for ages. You can see on YouTube.

I find it’s the speeders, tailgaters, and the infuriating few that can’t seem to manage to go at the prevailing speed that cause the waves in traffic. The rest is structural - merges, construction, lane reductions, etc. The aforementioned all cause the slowdowns because they move quickly, traffic tends to follow, and end up constantly hitting their brakes riding the ass of the slower traffic. That starts a wave that ends up with traffic stopping when density is high enough.

You can’t control others moving slower than you want, bitching about lane campers changes nothing, but managing a speed/spacing that allows little or no braking does wonders to keep things moving. If only people would bother to do so.

This is like saying you don’t know how a bottleneck works.

Exactly, it's entirely because the people in front of you are going slow.

Hey I studied this in grad school for a bit, and it really is just "someone does some dumb shit which leads to a cascading wave of additional people doing dumb shit which propagates backwards for miles." Basically when the offered load is getting close to the maximum load, all it takes is one person aggressively changing lanes to throw that section of highway into gridlock, and it will remain that way until the total integrated traffic flux across that incident boundary again falls below the critical offered load inflection point.

Basically, pick a lane and just stay in it. Maintain proper following distance. Counterintuitively, the following distance should be for the speed you want to drive, so even in traffic it should be like 5+ car lengths even though you are going slow. This is because it reduces the offered load, and once that number falls below the critical point, speeds will increase again. Bumper to bumper traffic basically prevents that from happening because it dampens the ability for a "speedup" wave to propagate.

Of course this is all impossible for humans. All it takes is a few idiots to throw off the balance.

Only ever have to ask, my friend

Heres an overview shot of a traffic pulse.

One person brakes for no reason which leads to everyone else braking. The pulse travels despite there being nothing there. The longer it can take for someone to start up again also can delay the whole thing.

Most traffic jams actually act as a kind of compression wave moving backwards through traffic. Something as small as a squirrel running across the road can cascade into an hour-long jam.

One person brakes, then the person behind them, then the person behind them, but each time they are getting closer to each other (nobody stays equidistant from the car in front of them when braking). This causes a greater and greater slowdown as more cars are compacted into a tighter space, which travels backwards in traffic like a wave. Often the person who caused it doesn't even realize anything happened.

A lot of mapping software actually estimates a given traffic slowdown by treating traffic as a fluid with a wave moving backwards through it.

A few years ago, I was bitching and moaning about a jam, and my pal just said "you're not in traffic, you are traffic".

I know it's nothing more than a cheeky soundbite but just reframing it like that and knowing I'm part of the problem rather than the exception has made me a lot calmer on slow moving roads.

Plus it has encouraged me to either use public transport more, or just drive to a park-and-ride a mile or three out, and run the rest - facilities permitting of course.

People drive too close to each other, someone has to slow down and then the car behind slows down a bit more. Repeat until you get to the point someone completely stops. Then the next car stops for slightly longer.

If you leave a safe distance then it wouldn't happen.

It all starts with someone in the passing lane, not passing, and one or more pissed off people behind them :)

The pissed off people trying to get around causes the wave of people behind them to brake and it snowballs from there.

3 fucking seconds

The answer is a simple 3 second gap.

That's it, just 3-mississippi (or 3-onethousand) seconds behind the car in front of you and most of the avoidable jams go away.

99% of traffic like this is caused by people following too closely.

The people at the front are morons and probably in the wrong lane.

It's the people not zipper merging correctly. You have idiots entering that are not up to speed and you have idiots breaking for the idiots not up to speed.

On ramps should be required to have their lane not end abruptly which causes the panic. The on ram should continue for at least a 1/4 mile.