Disobey the wave!

Alter suffering yesterday in a man- (or woman-) eating traffic jam, I thought I’d post some useful techniques for avoiding so much despair.


The first is: disobey the wave!

First, an explanation. Traffic isn’t uniform. It moves in clusters or bunches as can be appreciated in a video that can be seen at this address. In slow-moving traffic the effect is more pronounced. From the air, the long string of cars looks like an expansion and compression wave, even though one’s immediate experience is just of starting and stopping the car.

We might say we obey a physical law just like any other inert particle of matter.

When I realized this, my wounded self-pride made me try to disobey the law. But then I noticed the effect my disobedience had on the cars behind me.


To achieve this we have to adopt a median speed and allow a space between our car and the one in front of us, a sort of an air-bag that grows in fast traffic and diminishes when the cars move more slowly. We are basically transmitting the wave to the empty space and for this reason we don’t have to start and stop so much. Our cars don’t over-heat and we get where we are going with less fuss and bother.

Another result is that all the cars behind us also have a more or less uniform speed.