[cwoods]

Agree 100%.

From the article:

>Suppose you’re on a 2-lane (each way) highway and one lane is closed up ahead due to construction. Now the flow rate of your lane is cut in half (or there are twice as many cars in line in front of you, depending on how you want to look at it).

What I observe is that the speed is reduced to one twentieth of the speed, not just half. This is because people are merging very slowly while jostling resulting in needless braking. If everyone could agree upon a proper zipper merge, the speed for everyone would go up many times.

Or imagine a traffic signal at the merge point that only lets one lane go through for a minute each. The overall flow rate would be much higher than what it is without such a signal.

Discounting this based on theoretical flow rate (as if removing one lane reduces real traffic flow by only 50%) shows that the author totally ignores real traffic scenarios completely at odds with the title of the article.

[rdmcfee]

I think you're may be thinking of this as one mechanism instead of two separate mechanisms.

You are dealing with a queue as well as a through-rate at the merge-point. The through-rate with one lane can still be 1/2 of the through-rate with two lanes, but because you have a queue waiting to reach the merge-point you can end up waiting much longer. More spacious merging will not change this because of the principle stated in the first paragraph of the article.

Increasing the speed at the merge-point will not decrease the queue. It will only decrease the density of the queue but move it back further in traffic. Your time to cross the merge-point will be basically the same.

[cwoods]

>Increasing the speed at the merge-point will not decrease the queue. It will only decrease the density of the queue but move it back further in traffic. Your time to cross the merge-point will be basically the same.

I have to disagree with this. If you increase the speed at the merge point, someone who is newly joining the queue will definitely cross the merge point in lesser time than with lesser speed at the merge point.

[mavhc]

That doesn't matter though, as if they're going faster they're more spaced out. Only 2000 cars per hour can pass the merge point

[msandford]

Sure, but when traffic jams happen you often see not just ONE lane of traffic slowing down at the merge point but ALL lanes of traffic slowing down. On a four lane freeway narrowing to three lanes it's not the case that the two right lanes are stop & go and the two left lanes are 80MPH. EVERYONE slows to 10MPH. Furthermore the notion that you'll get 2000 cars per hour at the merge point irrespective of speed is ludicrous. Once everything slows down people act really douchey and don't let each other merge, etc.

I have witnessed eight lanes of traffic slow from 70MPH to 10MPH over a single poorly designed merge when there was more than enough aggregate free space for the merge. That happened because drivers don't accelerate hard enough on onramps and people don't redistribute themselves prior to shitty merges.

Show me a society that has no traffic jams and I'll show you one that's ready for socialism. Or vice versa.

[rdmcfee]

It's not about velocity it's about rate of cars through a point per hour. If you have a mergepoint with 10 lanes. Each lane can support say 20 cars per minute. If you have 200 cars approaching the merge-point per minute the cars can travel effectively at the speed of their choice.

If you close one lane, reducing the capacity of the mergepoint to 180 cars per minute while 200 cars are approaching a queue will build. The speed with which the cars mass the mergepoint is not relevant because the rate of cars per lane per minute will stay basically at 20 cars/lane/min.

As to your point about all lanes slowing down - cars will always redistribute as you can imagine. People tend to merge left as there's an additional traffic stream merging on their right. The writer made points about the capacity of the mergepoint vs. the cars approaching- not individual lanes and speeds.

[mavhc]

Indeed. The more interesting points to be discussed are

1. If the flow rate changes with speed, thus merging at 5 mph instead of 50 is bad.

2. What will prevent accidents. I suggest start-stop traffic causes more accidents than free flow.

3. Fuel efficiency, which would depend on many things, eg the percentage of cars in traffic that stop their engines when the car is stopped.