45 vs. 55 is not modest; that's 5 minutes over only 20 miles. Up around 60 vs. 70 is where it becomes "modest" IMO.

The subsidies for cars is crazy when you look at it from that perspective. What you need to do is invest a lot of money in areas and systems that can make it better over time. In the end you are going to spend less.

Oh I agree, I mean there was no solution to traffic in my comments.

I do think some don't appreciate that it is not an anti-car stance to wish for less car dependant cities. You still get to have a car, and commuting by car should be easier if you need it, since there is less demand on the limited resource that is the road network.

Hard disagree. It is not safer to ignore your safety buffer. It is certainly not safer to defend your buffer.

If traffic is very busy, the trick is to just accept people will wedge in front of you and keep going slightly smaller each time to increase the buffer again. You might create 'turbulence', which might possibly decrease the safety a bit for all the impatient drivers doing the wedging. But it increases your own safety. And therefore also that of the people following you and your passengers.

I'm also not convinced on the 'turbulence' part. Keeping a buffer smoothes out any sudden speed variations of the people in front of you, which makes the traffic behind you flow better.

And it might maybe feel a lot slower to let a 100 cars go in front of you on your commute, but just driving 99km/h when the person in front of you does 100 is enough to increase your gap and it makes a whopping 1% of difference.

The only thing is: sometimes a road is just too busy and the space for a buffer just isn't there to begin with. At that point the speeds should go down to accommodate the smaller buffers, which is actually what happens here in the netherlands as long as there aren't too many people ignoring the speeds advisory boards above the highway.

> The issue is that when you slow down, you’re (a) creating ‘turbulence’ in the traffic flow with increased speed differential between cars and increased lane changes, which increases accident risk for everybody, and (b) it’s not even solving the problem because you still perpetually have some impatient driver wedging themself in directly in front of you, deleting your buffer zone.

That's very obviously not true. Slowing down always reduces energy in the system and always reduces global turbulence. It's one of the reasons that countries that lower speed limits see journey times reduce.

That seems like a surprising enough statement to be backed up by data. What is your source?

Everything I've read points toward larger margins of safety (longer distances, slower speeds) being safer.

See e.g. https://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/252480...

American road laws are insane here. The law should be simple; you must be in the outside lane at all times unless you are overtaking, and once you're done overtaking, you should merge back into the outside lane.

https://www.highwaycodeuk.co.uk/overtaking.html

You might be a bad driver and not even know it.

This is dangerous nonsense. It's basically just a justification people find in order to feel good about their unsafe driving.

This is a long thread of people talking past each other. The bottom line is simply this: if you want to drive with a larger-than-average following distance (call it whatever you want, a safety buffer, a "proper" following distance, the point is it is a distance less than the average following distance of the other drivers on the road) then you have to accept that you will not be able to drive at the same speed as the other traffic on the road. It's physically impossible. It can be psychologically frustrating because you see all the cars around you moving at X mph but your self-imposed constraints mean you can only make way at (X minus Y) mph. But them's the breaks, no pun intended

Everyone merges into your lane

Their old lane speeds up because many cars departed it

Everyone merges back to their old lane

You're back where you started.

The fastlane is just another name for the leftmost lane, I am not talking about the one moving fastest.

Again we are not talking about the fastest lane here we are talking about the safest as the OP was concerned about following distance.

> That's exactly my point. Which is why you can be in the right lane, and tons of people from the slower lane will try to merge in front of you

If everyone merged right it would not longer be faster but people do not do this. In the right lane you can slow down as much as you want and never cause an issue so you can always make a gap. In any other lane if you slow down more than traffic you cause issues because people will then try and pass you from the right which is dangerous.

You are placing the burden of your forward following gap on the cars around you but that is a terrible way to drive. You need to be in control of yourself when driving, do not trust that someone is going to follow traffic laws, do not trust that they will go whatever way there turn signal says, do not trust that they will look over there shoulder before merging.

If YOU want a following gap then the only possible safe way to do this is to merge all the way right and slow down whenever someone merges in front of you. There is no other way to do it in heavy traffic. And YES you will have to live with the fact that you will be driving slower than the traffic around you. That's the trade you make if you choose to have a large following gap.

You do, but if you leave so much that 20 cars are pulling in front of you, you’ve either driving too slow or misjudged and left unnecessary space. At 15-20 mph traffic speeds, you need 8-20 feet. Ideally, cars in a multiple lane to one lane exit scenario should be zipper merging when congestion reduces speeds. Engineers model this behavior and try to design roads to encourage it.

If you do that and get angry when people change lanes in front of you, you have consciously or subconsciously decided you own that 20 foot gap. That reaction impairs judgement and causes accidents.

That sounds like a recipe to crash into someone. Let natural selection work.

Nobody is getting screwed. I've been the person making the gap many many times. You just ignore them, it isn't hard - they are way up there and I'm way back here, plenty of space. I just keep on with my business of safely driving. Sure I often wish I could go the speed limit - but in reality I'm going almost as fast as they are so it isn't like a few feet lost costs me anything. Odds are I'll be stopped at a red light and lose a lot more time once I get off the highway.

Besides, there are only a few people who ever merge in front of me (and then those who don't merge block their lane so nobody else can get in).