I real life tough, the cars behind fund a new company and pass the slow one. Well, at least if you’re in not in communist country (if such a thing still exists)

–Omar

Long ago at an awesome conference I saw a spectacular presentation by some guys at Los Alalmos. They managed to simulate all the traffic in the Dallas / Ft. Worth metroplex, down to individual cars. Not only that, the cars belonged to specific people who lived in specific places, commuted to work at particular places, ran errands to different places, etc. all according to their own schedules and needs. They used census and survey data to get the basis for the underlying distributions. The cars all drove on the “real” roads, negotiating curves, mergers, traffic controls, intersections, etc. For modeling purposes they required the cars never to touch, and if the resulting braking acceleration was too high when cars neared each other, an accident was delacred and handled appropriately.

They turned the virtual people loose and watched. They found very typical traffic patterns, even to the point of re-creating the backwards propogating delay that persists long after an impediment has cleared.

If that’s not cool enough, they made a “real time” aerial view of the traffic at night, which was incredibly convincing.

Finally they simulated a large scale disaster such as would be expected with a terrorist attack, or an impending one which is known. Traffic ground to a halt as you would expect. The take home lesson was that hardly anyone would be able to get to safety.

On a happier note, they pointed out that the model could be used to assess proposed changes to the roadways, to see what the effect on traffic would really be. Traffic changes are often non-intuitive.

I suppose they could have adopted the policy after they had enough employees to make a statistically significant random sample, but I prefer to go on believing that I’ve debunked an urban myth.

One way of clearing these kinds of traffic jams is to gradually slow the traffic behind the traffic jam – 70mph to 60mph to 50mph etc. This way the speeds are less reactive and a gap opens up ahead of this traffic in which the traffic density is lower and the compression wave can dissipate.

One day, we’ll drive onto the motorway and our cars will enter a kind of following mode where they synchronise their speed with nearby cars and drive a few feet apart. This is highly fuel-efficient and negates all the above problems entirely.

So, drivers don’t just end up driving very slowly as a stable state, as the OP suggests, but oscillate. In high density traffic, they can come to a temporary stop.

Another explanation of mediocrity in large corporations is this: if you’re good at you’re job, you get promoted. Eventually, you’re in a job you’re only mediocre at, so you stop getting promoted. Thus everyone gets promoted to mediocrity. Combine this with the depressive effect an unhappy and bad manager has on his team members, and you find that frequently an issue arises that puts people out of their depth from the top down, and an avalanche of blame richochets down to the poor guys at the bottom. Enough of this and everyone keeps their head below the firing line, careful not to look clever.

Drivers speed up and slow down for various reasons over time. Say someone’s speed varies 10 mph. On an open highway they can average 55 by driving between 50 and 60. But if someone in front of them is driving a constant 55, they will have to slow down to 50 in order to be able to maintain their usual variability.

That’s a flawed assumption. After driving a little bit slower for a short period of time, the second pair of cars can speed up to drive at the same speed as the leading pair. The distance, providing everyone’s driving at a constant speed, is going to remain the same.

Similarly, talent//smartness is not unidirectional. It’s not a vector it’s a field.