I didn't hear any deep societal issues being addressed and the depth of the commentary was consistently shallow.

In fact, these are the same mainstream, shallow attempts at 'profound thought' that we get from Hollywood and Madison Avenue. The type of mass appeal positivity that viral advertisers try to capture because it so easily plucks the emotions of the everyday, busy, 9-5 commuter.

And here it's being delivered by exactly the type of person that will be ignored, out of hand, by the same busy people who will go home and endlessly upvote and share these same thoughts. As long as they come in the form of a youtube video with dramatic background music. (ahem) Why is our acceptance of the message conditional on the social acceptability of the medium by which it's delivered? Do we fear being ostracized to the community of mad men if we don't hate his message?

I feel like I'm being mocked for my readiness to expose the vapid sentimentality that's replaced meaningful emotions in my life.

Maybe I missed the point. The music was a fitting addition though.

I like this video. Upvote and Share.

I am in full agreement with this, having both been a bicycle commuter smashed up by an idiot driver, and being a car commuter nearly running down idiot cyclist disturbingly often (though to be fair, they're usually the wannabe bike messenger types who get a kick out of weaving through traffic and disregarding one-way streets and such).

If you're going to ride a bicycle in the street, you need to follow the traffic laws as though you were a slow car (this is, in fact, the law in most places). Otherwise you're just dangerously unpredictable. I do appreciate that there are occasional times when it's safer to bend the rules, but predictability really is the key.

I think the proper response is, an insurance pool, combined with extensive testing.

Let's be honest, these don't have to be amazingly reliable to be safer than humans. Not to mention how many wasted hours could be reclaimed, when commuters don't have to drive themselves.

I feel like I can take a middleground on the whole tailgating issue, as a commuting biker I tend to experience both ends of the equation quite regularly and IMHO the problem lies in the extremes in attitude.

On the one hand if you drive/ride a lot and have good confidence in the vehicle and roadcraft in general (frequently the case with professional van and truck divers) it can be extremely frustrating when people don't practice good lane and speed discipline. I don't mean people maintaining a decent pace (it's your problem if you want to go faster than posted limits and they don't) I mean people either:
A. Driving below the posted limit (within reason)
B. Accelerating to speed absurdly slowly or slowing to 2mph to take a corner you could hit at 10-20 comfortably
C. Hogging the outside/passing lane because THEY are going as fast as THEY want to go so why should they speed up or slow down to get out of everybodys way? (C**TS!)

Under the above circumstances I understand why people end up tailgating, in fact I think it happens without much of a conscious effort most of the time. They are going so far below the pace the seems reasonable that you close the gap without realising. Getting to this stage is understandable/inevitable, it's what you do next that defines you as a responsible road user:

A responsible driver/rider at this point backs off, the point has already been made to the driver in front. They know they are going slower than you want to go or that you want to pass in the passing lane they are hogging. Sitting on their bumper is not only dangerous to both of you but it's obnoxious and likely to be counter productive. When you see someone driving too close your natural response is to slow down for safety or simply as a fuck you to the other guy. Even if you were about to get out of their way you might change your mind and think "screw you buddy I got the hint but now your just being rude".

When I back away I find people let me through far more often, wheras in the past when i've just tail gated them like a dick it's got me nothing but two angry motorists (and a hugely elevated chance of an incident). The lorry driver could have left a bigger gap but it didn't look that unreasonable (plus lorries have a hard time gaining speed and are naturally inclined (and taught) to preserve it where possible).

It might not be that unfair to suggest he was antagonising the car infront, but it pales into insignificance compared to...

.....the other side of the equation (which blue peugeot falls squarely into) who are generally IMHO far worse/more dangerous. The one's that adopt an imperious and selfish attitude to speed and road position. "I'm going as fast as I want to go and there's car on the inside that I'll pass in about 30seconds so I'm just going to sit in the outside lane going 2mph faster than slow lane traffic, because why should I have to go to the trouble of changing lanes to let someone else go faster than I want to go!"

Touching the brakes to give a tailgater a shock done properly is fine (I might even go so far as to recommend it) but holy shit! I think it'd be dangerous to scrub more than 1 or 2mph never mind an illegal stop on a dual carageway. Even if there was a mechanical reason for stopping it's still illegal to stop there without pulling off to the side.

Either way 45k in damages feels like pretty just deserts. I dearly hope he got at least a 12 month ban to boot. There's slipping up and then there's premeditated dangerous driving!

I usually try to see things from everybody's perspective when it comes to stuff like this but the Peugot driver is so disproportionately stupid and reckless than I can't really even try to defend him/her. I get why they might have been annoyed but that all became irrelevant the moment they tried to cause an accident!

Living in NYC and taking subway for commute twice a day, I'd say for every "legitimate" homeless asking for help, there's 2 pieces of shit like http://videosift.com/video/Bogus-Beggar

So he met the love of his life because he stopped to ask directions? How about where he got to wherever he was going without getting lost and met the love of his life there?

And we should stop using our phones on public transport, wind the clocks back to a time when everyone.... read books or the newspaper and continued to ignore other people on a commuter train.

A couple Hellfire pods and you got yourself the Ultimate Commuter Vehicle.

Hmm... kanji + katakana. Japan. To be recording that early, that's got to be a long commute.

Nope. Math certainly allows you to "shift stuff all over the place". It's the commutative property that you might have learned formally in grade 7 or so, which in terms of addition can be described as "You can add numbers together in any order you like, and the solution will be the same".

If you want to add

(1 + 2 + 3)
+(7 + 8 + 9)
---------------
30
you can rearrange them any way you like and it's the same sum:

(1 + 2 + 3)
+(9 + 8 + 7)
---------------
30

So long as all the numbers in both series get added into the pool at some point, it's good math. So shift away.

I have this motion sickness when I try to read, watch, etc. in a moving vehicle. I have to close my eyes (sleep is even better if possible and faster). I hate commuting.

I just commute on a motorcycle instead

"Traffic?......what traffic?...You mean that stuff not moving either side of these special motorbike lanes?"

The roads have a capacity.
~15 feet per car.

100 feet of road will fit about 6 or 7 cars, bumper to bumper.
Alternatively, 100 cars will require 1500 feet of distance to fit.

If a driver keeps 30 feet in front of him, at all times, even when stopped in traffic, then that takes the total per-car size up to 45 feet.
100 feet of road now fits 2 cars.
100 cars now require 4500 feet of distance to fit.

The greater the distance kept between cars, the bigger the strain on road capacity, and the farther back the traffic jam will stretch.



Traffic jams in massive commuter areas do not exist because people are driving too close.

They exist because the rate of people entering the highway exceeds the rate of people exiting the highway, for a long enough duration that the highway 'runs out of room' to fit the cars.

You can widen the roads to increase capacity, so the traffic jam doesn't go as far back.
You can increase highway speed limits, so that people can attempt to 'evacuate' the highway faster.

(Travel-capacity in terms of cars-per-second of any given section of road, is 'cars-per-second-per-lane x number-of-lanes'. Increasing either factor will improve travel.)

...But you can't eliminate the jam.

The rate of 'highway exit' is determined by the number of exits, and the capacity of the exit roads to absorb traffic from the highway.

When people exit from a highway, they usually go into local traffic, and are met by a light within 100 feet.
Between the lights, and other cars looking for parking spots, pedestrians, etc, local traffic is a dog.

Highway traffic can't diffuse out of the exits fast enough, and the traffic backs up on the exit ramps, and then backs up onto the highway. Once the traffic backs up onto the highway, exiting traffic consumes a lane for queuing, which forms a choke.


Basically, to avoid a jam, the rate of people entering the highway can not exceed the maximum possible rate of people exiting and diffusing into the destination city.

Because 'everyone goes to work at once', and local traffic is not geared to rapidly absorb exiting traffic, the jams are unavoidable.

Driving with a massive space in front, refusing to fill in the gap, only uses up the highway's buffering capacity more quickly.
That leads to the 'complete' jam happening sooner, where traffic is queued all the way from the destination, all down the highway, and onto the feeder roads miles away, blocking local traffic elsewhere.




IMO, if people really care abut stopping traffic jams, they should put a commuter parking lot at every exit at major commuter areas.

When you exit off of the highway, you would immediately wind your way through a parking lot, and at the other end of the lot you would exit into local traffic.

The parking lot acts as a buffer, allowing the highway exit lane to not get backed up, and prevents the queue from building up onto the highway.

That way the traffic on the highway can travel without chokes.

Although, this would just move the "parking lot" occurring on the highway, into a literal parking lot. You'd still be stuck waiting a while, as the rate of people exiting the parking lot into local traffic would still be limited by the rate at which local traffic can absorb the highway traffic.

Basically, to have literally no waiting, the city streets absorbing exiting highway traffic need the same uninterrupted cumulative bandwidth as the highway.

In the end, if you want to fix highway traffic jams, fix city streets.




You can make the argument that keeping more space in front will make people more comfortable with driving faster, and traffic will move faster.
But, that faster moving traffic will merely more quickly arrive at the same clogged exit, and queue with the same other cars waiting to get onto the local roads.

-scheherazade

@shatterdrose

Agreed, don't film while driving and the free market is very much like a highway.

At times things zip along quickly, but the selfish motives and aggressive acceleration and deceleration of the typical commuter are the main causes of both volume-related and collision based traffic jams. In much the same way, the risky bets in a Wall Street boom result in a painful economic correction or financial traffic jam.

In fact, there's now a mathematical model that demonstrates the cause of traffic jams (the bilateral-control algorithm.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nk87bwAL6PI

I loved all the drug charges being commuted to time served.

Stupid American Fundamental Wrath of God Punishment.

Wasn't it "vengeance is mine, saith the Lord"?

Then again, they also said those few black kids going to all white schools were idiots too . . . Or those few Indians who stood against British rule . . . Or perhaps those few women who protested and marched until they had the right to vote?

See, the problem with that statement is that many cyclists are actually out there to change the world for what they perceive is a better way of life. Not to mention, they have tons of research on the subject to back up their claims (unlike the situations I cited, which btw, I am well aware are on a totally different level of human abuse).

The issue is of course is you have some die hard cyclists who aren't there to make a statement, but because they're counter-culture. They're hipsters. They're going to run stop signs because "fuck authority" etc. Then again, I've been hit 6 times in my car. Care to guess how many of those were because someone didn't obey a traffic law? That's why we have those rules to begin, to prevent "accidents" from occurring.

As a cyclist-commuter, and as someone who drives thousands of miles as work requires, I say if a cyclist blows through a stop sign and you hit them, their own damned fault.

Many of us, including myself, have petitioned to create a Yield on Stop Under 30 rule. In essence, we have way to many stop signs in this country. This goes for cars as well. And you know you've done it at some point: you come to a stop sign in some part of a housing project and you "California Roll" through it. Or a "Brooklyn Stop." Whatever you want to call it.

But I do know some cyclists who blatantly disobey rules as a fuck you. But as a cyclist who stops at red lights, who stops at stops signs, who checks behind me to see if I can make it easier for a car to pass me, the whole "fuck cyclists" thing tells me exactly what I see on the streets everyday: we don't need cars. Cars create assholes. Cars insulate you from the world around you and the people around you become anonymous boxes of steel that you don't care about. It's a me me me me society.

To that matter, the cycling community here in Orlando is pretty big given our population and disgusting sprawl patterns. The majority of us you'll never notice because we're doing things right. Some of us, you will notice because we are doing things right. When we make a left turn, we get in your way. So would any other vehicle. Are we going too slow? Suck it up. I can't tell you how many times some asshole comes within inches of me trying to speed past me . . . on a 25 MPH road while I'm doing a good 18. We almost always end up at the same stop sign or red light.

So yeah, as you said, the extreme ones are stupid. It goes both ways, as you said. But FYI, the world would be a better place if everyone rode a bike. Just saying.