Surely you will fall into it this weekend, during the traditional crossover weekend between julists and augusts: the famous traffic jams on the vacation route. In fact, traffic jams are likely to be numerous and this, since Friday, a day classified in red in the direction of departures. But how do traffic jams form?
a disturbing element
It all starts with a disruptive event in heavy traffic: a lane change, sudden braking, or a driver driving slower than others.
“This will cause a shock wave that will affect traffic on the highway,” Laurent Nazzani, director of road safety operations at Vinci Autoroutes, told BFMTV.
The other cars will slow down or even stop at this unsettling fact. The plug has formed. The more cars are present, the longer the shockwave will be and it will grow. Traffic jams more rarely result from an exceptional circumstance, such as an accident or works.
Changing lanes is useless
And if you look at the queue next to you, you want to change lanes because it seems to be going faster than you. Mistake. This is useless, an American study proved it in the late 1990s. In 1999, Donald A. Redelmeier of the University of Toronto in Canada and Robert J. Tibshirani of Stanford University in California studied this phenomenon . Therefore, the two researchers modeled a two-lane highway, with an average speed of 100 km/h and vehicles of different powers, per hundred.
The result is clear: after ten minutes of experience, the two lines move at the same speed, but not necessarily at the same time. Hence this impression of constantly being overtaken by the neighboring queue. And by dint of inadvertent lane changing by all drivers, the gridlock risks getting even worse.
How to avoid traffic jams?
So how do you avoid traffic jams on the way to vacation? There is no real magic bullet, apart from perhaps leaving earlier in the morning or later at night, so as not to leave at the same time as everyone else and thus smooth traffic for longer. . And they don’t all end up on the road at the same time. You can also make routes
But on this crossover weekend, the chances of escaping traditional traffic jams seem limited.
Source: BFM TV
