my old roommate tom is having a pet peeve week on his AIM profile. every day this week, he is going to list one of his pet peeves. he also expects that anyone that reads his profile this week and reads his pet peeves is obligated to share and exchange with him; specifically calling out “‘get buddy info’ hit and run”-ers. since i am notorious for buddy info hit and run, and because i’ve been doing a lot of driving back and forth between here and the east bay recently, i should own up and talk about one of my biggest pet peeves: bad drivers, or more specifically, bad driving habits.
i updated this post to get rid of all the math-like stuff to make it a bit more appealing for those who don’t want to spend a ton of time deciphering cryptic equations written on a web page.
for me, driving is all about throughput. i believe that the flow of traffic should be such that if you summed up the speed at which everyone on the road is driving, the total would be the maximum possible total given that everyone is driving at a speed at which they are comfortable and can control their vehicle. basically, waiting is minimized, and everyone is driving at their ideal speed as often as physically possible. there are three specific habits that i find especially irritating and non-conducive to my ideal situation.
1. people in the right lane who hog the entire lane width at a stop light because they are totally oblivious that there are people behind them wanting to make a right turn.
thought a diagram might help for this one:
approximate gain in total throughput by him scooching to the right: the distance i could have traveled while he was busy being oblivious at the stoplight + the progession of anyone else behind me that wanted to turn right as well.
2. people who don’t understand the concept of right of way or don’t know when to yield.
hey, at a four-way intersection. if you have a green light, but no protected left turn, that means you yield to oncoming traffic that is not turning left! people still don’t understand this, or refuse to understand this and just blow through their left turns at these intersections!
approximate short run gain in total throughput by yielding: none
approximate long run gain in total throughput by yielding: the speed up of careful drivers everywhere who always pause at four-way intersections with unprotected left turns because you never know when the next moron who’s signalling left is going to barrel right into you.
approximate decrease in body count at intersections with unprotected left turns: a million
3. people who don’t understand the concept that organization of lanes and the corresponding speeds of cars traveling on them increases from the right-most lane to the left-most lane. this spawns an entire sub-category of bad habits, but basically reduces into a few bad habits.
a. not allowing a car in the left-most lane to pass, when you are in the left-most lane and he is gaining quickly on you.
yeah, we all hate tailgaters, but you know what, when you are in the left-most lane, and you see the headlights coming on you, please move to the right and let the punk pass. even if he is way over the speed limit, your role out there isn’t to enforce the rules. besides, the speed limit is sort of a crock anyways. it is what the government has deemed to be the maximum safest speed at which a civilian can drive a vehicle in a certain zone. in reality, this is different for different people, but since people are usually pretty bad at regulating themselves, and will inherently drive recklessly, a speed limit had to be put in place.
back to my point. the left lane is for passing. if you are stubborn and don’t let the guy pass, you are again inhibiting throughput. and in a semi-crowded highway, you’ll probably end up forcing him to pass on the right. if there is an entire row of cards stacked up behind you and you’re just too stubborn to yield… then you’re a nuisance and deserve to be the first one shot when road rage is deemed a healthy form of expression by neo-liberal psychlogists.
i know there’s a sticky situation where you’re in the left lane and moving faster than the lane to the right of you. in this case, yeah, this means that you’ll have to slow down for a bit. but as long as the gain in throughput (as expressed below) is positive, do it.
approximate gain in throughput by moving over to the right for one car tailing behind you: the additional distance the tailing car would have traveled if you had let him pass, minus the decrease in distance you experience for pulling over to let him through.
in the end, the gain should really be multiplied by the number of cars behind you that want to drive faster than you, with their desired speeds plugged into the formula.
b. tailgating a car in the right-most lane/moving to the left to allow someone tailgating you in the right-most lane to pass. (SAD = Slow Ass Driver)
you punk. now you’re just a bully. the right-lane is meant for the SADs and anyone driving in the right lane should be allowed to drive at whatever speed they want. if you want to pass, go ahead and pass on the left. by the same token, if you’re in the right lane, don’t move over for the bastard that is tailing you. you’re just going to slow down the lane to the left of you.
approximate loss in throughput by you tailing a SAD in the right lane (if he doesn’t move): the distance you could have traveled if you would just take your time to get into a faster lane
approximate gain in throughput if you force the SAD to move to the left lane so you and your greedy-ass can pass as opposed to tailing SAD forever: the distance you can travel at your desired speed until you reach your destination… or until you hit another SAD in the slow lane (highly unlikely…) minus the decrease in distance traveled by all the cars in the lane to the left of you who have been slowed down by the SAD moving over so you can pass - minus the distance you would have traveled in the same period had you stayed behind the SAD.
approximate gain in throughput if you just pass on the left as opposed to tailing him forever: the distance you travel moving at the lane to the immediate left over the time period for which it takes for you to pass the sad, plus the distance you would travel at your desired speed until your destination/until you hit anothe SAD minus the distance you would have traveled had you stayed behind the SAD, for the time period in question.
notice that in this scenario, there is a variable in how many SADs you run into in the right lane. if there are a particularly large number of SADs on the freeway that day, do everyone a favor and stay out of the right lane.
c. passing on the right… i realized that this is mainly caused by adverse road conditions (people not obeying the organization of relative speeds in lanes of traffic, so just move onto (d) ).
d. moving at the exact same or slower speed than the person in the lane to the right of you (this becomes bad habit 3a when you are in the left-most lane - and this is a cardinal sin).
ah… this is the big one. if just this rule is always followed, then we will always have near maximum throughput on our freeways. if this rule is followed, given any lane, the lane to its left will always be moving faster, and the lane to its right will always be moving slower. why is it so important? because it creates an ordered speed hierarchy on the freeway. fast drivers get to drive faster, slow drivers get to driver slower and on average nobody gets in anybody else’s way.
let’s say that this rule isn’t followed. let’s say that every lane travels at the same speed. the problem here is, then that the fast drivers are mixed with the slow drivers. and at some point, every lane will have a slow driver that limits the speed of everyone behind them.
if you imagined that all of these slow drivers were driving in a straight line across the freeway, you’ve just limited the entire throughput of the freeway to time * slow driver’s speed. if you stagger these slow drivers, then you end up in the situation we have today, where fast drivers are zooming in and out of lanes cutting in past one slow driver before arriving at the next slow driver and cutting around him. this in turn, causes accidents. when accidents happen, average speed is reduced to “Slower Than SAD” which is really sad. and when road rage is legalized, that will also lead to a lot of dead drivers… who drive at idle speed or 0mph… depending on if you’re driving stick or not.
so again, why is the ordered hierarchy good? because basically, if there is no yielding at all, every driver is driving at a speed that deviates very little from their ideal speed.
why is it that it has to be from slow to fast? why can’t the hierarchy be unordered? (i.e. fast lane in middle, slow lane on left, average lane on right) because merging will cause too many slowdowns. unless the slow lane is on the far right, someone in the slow lane will always have to pass through a faster lane in order to exit the freeway, which will temporarily slow down that lane.
given that, if the second slowest lane isn’t immediately to the left of the slowest lane, then someone in the second slowest lane will always have to pass through a faster lane in order to get to the slow lane, in order to exit, and that will slow down that faster lane… and so forth.
maintain the hierarchy everyone, that’s what it’s there for. then obey passing rules, and someday we will achieve maximum vehicular throughput.
