Impulse control and the general idea of delaying minor pleasures now that will have significant benefits later, or even just not doing things that kinda feel good in the moment but will make you miserable in the near future. As a species we’re pretty terrible at those kinds of judgments.
The meme of the guy poking a stick into his bike wheel in one frame and lying in a crumpled pile in the next is timeless for exactly that reason. Same with shocked Pikachu.
This was my thought too, delayed gratification. Lot’s of people make short term decisions that have negative long-term effects on their mental, physical, or financial health. And humanity does it as well, such as pollution or using fossil fuels when we know it’s going to cause problems in the future.
I was going to say long-term thinking. We’re just not wired to consider long-term consequences for the things we do. We continually get duped by promises of lower taxes without considering the damage it will cause for decades to come.
Many people, including myself, are too dumb to understand that other people don’t value the same thing in us that we value in others.
You see them try and become what they like, in order to try to appeal to others. “Well I wish I got more attention, so I’m going to give tons and tons of attention to others”. “I wish someone would make a grand romantic gesture to me, so I’m going to do that to someone else”. That kind of thing.
This is sometimes called “fundamental attribution error” although I think that concept covers a bit more ground.
This is not the fundental attribution error. The fundamental attribution error is seeing an action from a person and assuming it is a fundamental attribute of them. Literally in the name. E.g. you seem someone being rude in public so you assume they are a rude person. Meanwhile if you are rude in public you chalk it up to being in a bad mood as a result of something that happened to you, not because you are a rude person.
It’s really similar to the fundamental attribution error, though, as you can see if phrased this way: “I value $foo by a certain amount because I’m a human being, thus other human beings value $foo as much as I do”.
Thinking that tailgating the vehicle directly in front of them will make thousands of other vehicles in front of that vehicle magically go faster. And many other reckless car-brain stunts.
Is this the root pathology behind traffic? Like, I never understood traffic, is there someone at the front refusing to go fast enough or is it the result of some distributed error like this that everyone mis-optimizes for that in aggregate results in traffic?
Based on a game* I think that the root issue is that there are multiple bottlenecks, unavoidable for the drivers, like turning or entering/leaving lanes, forcing them to slow down to avoid crashing. Not a biggie if there are only a few cars, as they’ll be distant enough from each other to allow one to slow down a bit without the following needing to do the same; but once the road is close to the carrying capacity, that has a chain effect:
A slows down because it’ll turn
B is too close to A, so it slows down to avoid crashing with A
C is too close to B, so it slows down to avoid crashing with B
[…]
There are solutions for that, such as building some structure to handle those bottlenecks, but they’re often spacious and space is precious in a city. Or alternatively you reduce the amount of cars by discouraging people from using them willy-nilly, with a good mass transport system and making cities not so shitty for pedestrians.
*The game in question is OpenTTD. This is easy to test with trains: create some big transport route with multiple trains per rail, then keep adding trains to that route, while watching the time that they take to go from the start to the end. The time will stay roughly constant up to a certain point (the carrying capacity), then each train makes all the others move slower.
Laughs in good public transit(rail based is based, but buses are good too), where it can achieve 10~100x the capacity in the same footprint
With rail, as long as you have a good timetable and a robust signaling system, 27tpdph with multiple service patterns is achievable, and >33tpdph if you run just one service pattern, all while having a top speed of 120km/h and an average speed of >50km/h
Railway in general (excluding Line-of-sight based light rail and trams) can move stupendous amounts of people at full speed really quickly due to signaling and mass transit inherently being more efficient in general
Most of the time and places a city doesn't need that capacity. Since your rail cannot get the garbage from my house, or my new bed to the house, we need roads as well. Thus for most a bus running in mixed traffic (remember most roads do not have heavy traffic!) is good enough and a lot cheaper. Where you need capacity a train is really good, but you don't need it.
That said I support trains in a lot more places because trains can run fully automated and thus in the real world can achieve the high frequency people need to choose transit even when a car isn't a problem to own (they can afford it and there is no traffic). This is however just a stop gap since self driving buses don't exist (yet?). In most "first world" countries cost of labor is high and automated trains are thus useful in places where a bus could do the job.
Teaching people how to drive safe and smart. Way too many people focus on the car in front of them instead of the traffic ahead. If you watch for brake lights as far up as you can see and let off the gas when appropriate, not only will you be less likely to be in or cause a wreck, you will also save wear and tear on your brakes and use less gas (even more pronounced with regenerative braking).
In addition to the above. When you are driving a route you know well, get the fuck over from which ever side is more likely to be used to turn off. For most highways this means moving left before you near an onramp. Plan ahead and get over before you need to do so you don’t have to speed up or slow down to let people in.
That won't help much. By the time anyone notices the roads are slowing down there are six times as many cars on it as it can safely handle. Driving skills will help on backroads, but that isn't where most people are driving. No amount of training can make heavy traffic safe.
It will most definitely help. All it really will take is a certain percentage of people driving smart to make a difference.
As for safety. Heavy heavy traffic at a crawl is much safer than lighter traffic moving at or usually way above the speed limit. Yes, the chances of a rear-end collision are higher but no one is going to flip their car at 10mph. It’s the lighter traffic with idiots weaving in and out that makes it even more dangerous and more likely that someone dies when said idiot makes someone swerve out of the way or misjudges and hits something or someone they didn’t see coming.
I drive more miles in a couple of days than most people drive all month. I’ve probably racked up 500k+ miles in the past 25 years of driving. I’ve been almost run off the road more times than I can count and it wasn’t when traffic was at a crawl at the pinch points where traffic merges on to the highway.
Driving safely and smart is essential for other reasons, it does prevent additional bottlenecks (you mentioned one, wreckages), and it reduces the impact of the unavoidable bottlenecks (because the cars won’t waste so much time re-accelerating after them). But if my reasoning is correct, most of the time there isn’t much that drivers can do against traffic besides “don’t use the car”.
Traffic is a numbers game. I've often observed that in free flowing traffic where I live (a tiny city with only about 700k people in the entire metro) that if you take two cars that are a safe following distance apart there will be 5 cars in between. If we put in 6 times as many lanes (already a 3-4 lane freeway each way, so we are talk 20 lanes for my tiny city!) traffic wouldn't go any faster, but they would space out to most maintaining a safe following distance. (if you put in 7 times as many lanes they would get farther apart yet, but still not go faster)
There is research showing that adding lanes only helps for maybe six months. Then people realize that the route is better and change the routes they take, which leads to more congestion again. Fewer lanes can actually decrease congestion.
That research is useless! Sure they measured it, so it isn't wrong. However it is useless. What it is really saying is your city was so bad that people were not taking advantage of living in the city because they couldn't conveniently get places. Those people could have lived in rural Montana for all the good a city did. Cities are about all the things you can do by living in it, so if people change because of new roads then you are a city were not meeting their ideals.
Also note that they measured one lane. I already asserted that by the time a city is thinking about adding one more lane they already need to add 6 times as many lanes (not 6 more lanes, 6 times!) IF your city needs 6 times more lanes than it has, no wonder people are choosing alternates, and once a lane exists they will start using it.
It would, but worse. Both are a case of more cars than there is space. Heavy congestion would just need a lot more lanes to fix - maybe 10x as many. (don't ask me to pay for that or where those lanes go)
Or in short, support better transit for your city. For that cost of miles of 15 lane highways you can put in a lot of transit.
No, PRIVATE transit. I don't support the government building roads - that is meddling in the natural state of things and makes private industry unable to compete. If you must have socialist roads than you must have socialist transit as well, but I reject that.
It may be helpful to think of it as a stream or a river, and not a collection of individual drivers. We can only control ourselves, not the stream. People working so hard to put themselves and others at risk are maybe shaving a minute or so off of their commute. Just not worth the risk.
Or constantly inching forward at a red light as if you moving the extra 5 feet will make any significant difference in the time it takes for you to get where you’re going.
That actually has purpose, sometimes. Some lights are triggered by a sensor in the road. If I feel like the light has been red longer than it should be I’ll inch up in case my car didn’t trigger the sensor. Same happens in reverse, cars will be stopped too far back to trigger it so everyone sits until either they move up or the programmed cycle kicks in.
The above said. You aren’t wrong. Plenty of people do that where there aren’t sensors, they also stick their nose way too far out, especially in the left turn lane.
At highway speeds, tailgating 10 ft behind a 53 ft tractor-trailer will net you about a 39% boost in fuel economy. And further your fuel usage will drop by 100% after the trailer flattens your hood from a sudden stop maneuver!
I just drop a mph every couple seconds until they fuck off. Don’t break check, as that’s super dangerous for you and everyone around you; don’t change lanes to accommodate them (unless you’re the source of the bottleneck and camping in the fast lane, in which case GTFO), since transitions are when accidents tend to happen; but you can absolutely slowly annoy a tailgater until they leave your bubble.
I get tailgated all the time despite being in the right lane . Sometimes I can see that person hang up their phone, finally look and move over. (This was on a rural highway, I was doing 20 under the limit and over 15 minutes 3 other cars passed without issues, which accounts for a 5 cars going my direction in that time)
LOL, I also do the passive-aggressive slowdown thing. 99% of the time it works. But then there’s that rare psycho that refuses to get off your ass just to…uh…prove a point…by slowing themselves down? There was a post on schmeddit several years ago where a guy came to a complete stop in the middle of nowehere with the tailgator just sitting 1" from his bumper.
My favorite are the red light racers who have to pass me while I’m going the speed limit and zoom to the next stop light… Just so they can wait at a red light longer than I do.
Sadly it works out for them overall. It only takes a few times of getting to the next light as it turns yellow and they are way ahead while you are sitting there at a red light. Sure sometimes you get to see them when it doesn't work out, but when it works out they are long gone.
This isn’t my experience. Traffic lights are extremely easy to time. Assuming you can see the other lights, watch them. There are a few lights in my city that have a right turn light while the other is red, when the turn light goes yellow that means the red will be green soon. I regularly blow past people sitting at the red while I coasted towards the red and gunned it as it turned green.
They also won’t be going anywhere when they get t-boned by someone else doing the exact same thing or straight running a red. It’s not worth the risk.
Oh and this isn’t a race. The goal is to get to your destination safe and sound without hurting yourself or anyone else. The sooner more people realize that, the safer all of us will be.
I was referring to the city engineers timing all the lights in a city. As a driver paying attention can help, but when you have several square miles of road network, with roads unequally spaced, different speed limits and all the other weird stuff they do in a real city it is not easy. It gets worse if you go from city to a metropolitan area.
I have concluded we will never convince people of that enough to change behavior (they will answer the question correctly when asked, but drive the same) thus i'm supporting transit as much as possible.
Again not my experience. I grew up in Tampa and have lived/worked in other big cities like Charlotte. On the big main roads through town, the lights are usually timed so if you hit one green your golden (outside of extenuating circumstances) if you hit a red you’re screwed. They are also usually timed so if you hit a green and do the speed limit you should be fine and have all greens. It’s the idiots speeding or crawling that mess that up for themselves or others.
In addition to the above you have big cities like NYC, Vegas, etc that have a central traffic control and will change the timing to account for traffic. In my current city we don’t have that but a lot of the lights will go into red/yellow flashing mode where the main drag can cruise through but the cross street should be stopping but is free to go without waiting for the full cycle.
I’m not sure where you have lived or worked but in most places I’ve lived there have been only a couple of main thoroughfares and the rest all neighborhood roads that take twice as long even with traffic. Where I am now most of the time you are using the interstate to get across town east/west or for north/south you have like 3 options depending on where you are going. Some places you literally can’t get to without getting on the interstate or going some long ass way around.
I like how everyones complaining aboit micro xactions and monetization like console and pc games aren’t also doing that. Compare apples to apples, if you’re only going to talk about the free to play mobile games, you cant compare them to the $70 dollar titles on console and PC. Give it enough time and your PC free to plays and mobile ones will be monetized almost the same, weather thats due to new laws or the industries playing the long slow game of adding more and more monetization without spooking off the customers.
I assure you no one cares you're playing on your phone in public. Unless you have your game sound on speaker. Then they're staring at you because you're annoying them.
The vast majority of mobile games are not designed to be good games. They are designed to be addictive vehicles for advertising and micro transactions.
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