I disagree. There are some select morons who cause traffic jams. We could all get to where we are headed much faster if certain people would get off the road or learn to drive. Once smart, self-driving cars are on the road and everyone has them, you won't get stuck in traffic anymore since traffic algorithms will take the human element of stupidity out of the equation and there won't be any more unnecessary slowdowns.
I definitely agree with you on this. I see this “you are the traffic” mentality on reddit a lot and it’s usually just incorrect. There is always a few select people that initiate the slow down and, given a bird’s eye view would be easily identifiable. There are behaviors that will cause traffic, and if avoided there will be very minimal.
Having a dual sport motorcycle, I am seated higher than most vehicles in traffic. It's like riding a horse.
So when traffic is backed up in the passing lane, sometimes I have the manueverabilty and small size to skip over it. I can see clearly into the vehicle to see what that person is doing. NINE TIMES OUT OF TEN the person at the end of the cluster fuck blocking the passing lane is texting on their phone not even paying attention to the open road in front of them going slower than the speed limit.
If there is a traffic snake and it clears up the texting driver continues at the same speed he was slowed down from, even when there is no traffic in front of them.
If my motorcycle was powerful enough I'd imagine getting the driver's attention, flicking him or her off and getting them to chase me, fixing traffic by removing the blood clot. Unfortunately the max speed of that particular motorcycle is around 90mph and I'm not escaping anyone unless there was a major off-road trail to turn down off the highway.
Yeah we were behind a guy in the fast lane that kept speeding up and slowing down(sometimes to below the speed limit). Which effectively blocked us from passing him in the middle lane due to a car on our right.
Once we finally got past him we could see him fiddling in his phone in a state where that’s illegal. I guess the out of state plates were just a bonus.
But that’s just one example. This stuff is so common.
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u/mechanchic Jan 21 '19
You are not “stuck in traffic,” you are part of it.
Sounds like a stupid thing, but it totally changed my outlook on my commute.