(Warning: improvised English, this has been very hard for me, sorry)
There is a annoying effect that I can see in my city in most of the jams that I suffer. It's about the highway exits. The circular highway is usually three lanes wide. It has exits, many of which are slow (entries to the city). The exits take the form of an additional lane to the right. When the "contact zone" of the rightmost lane with the additional lane is long and the traffic is middle or heavy, the jam is a sure thing.
Why? Even if the exit has a reasonable speed, there are drivers that wait until the last moment to take the additional lane. There are so many that most of the vehicles that reach the exit are of this kind. If you are kind enough to take the additional lane as soon as it is possible, you get caught in a trap for ten to twenty minutes.
It's a moral dilemma. Either I am a good citizen and agree to be victimized for a quarter of an hour daily or I do the same to others. Please, don't ask me what I do.
It also creates a jam for the cars that aren't taking the exit, because the late changes of lane affect them. Not only the right lane, but also the middle one are filled with "late-exit-takers". And the slow cars have to change lanes to avoid the stopped cars waiting to exit.
I've observed that there is a disposition of lanes that prevents the problem: separating two lanes to exit and two lanes to follow on the highway, making the exit lanes long enough (to have a "buffer" for the slowness of the exit) and the fork instant, not a long "contact zone". But this disposition is seldon used and I haven't really made the experiment to be sure :-)
About the article: I don't think the ants are similar to cars at all. Drivers have freedom to behave differently, some are in a real hurry and we have different speed of reaction (to use the holes in the exit to wait to the last moment).
There is a annoying effect that I can see in my city in most of the jams that I suffer. It's about the highway exits. The circular highway is usually three lanes wide. It has exits, many of which are slow (entries to the city). The exits take the form of an additional lane to the right. When the "contact zone" of the rightmost lane with the additional lane is long and the traffic is middle or heavy, the jam is a sure thing.
Why? Even if the exit has a reasonable speed, there are drivers that wait until the last moment to take the additional lane. There are so many that most of the vehicles that reach the exit are of this kind. If you are kind enough to take the additional lane as soon as it is possible, you get caught in a trap for ten to twenty minutes.
It's a moral dilemma. Either I am a good citizen and agree to be victimized for a quarter of an hour daily or I do the same to others. Please, don't ask me what I do.
It also creates a jam for the cars that aren't taking the exit, because the late changes of lane affect them. Not only the right lane, but also the middle one are filled with "late-exit-takers". And the slow cars have to change lanes to avoid the stopped cars waiting to exit.
I've observed that there is a disposition of lanes that prevents the problem: separating two lanes to exit and two lanes to follow on the highway, making the exit lanes long enough (to have a "buffer" for the slowness of the exit) and the fork instant, not a long "contact zone". But this disposition is seldon used and I haven't really made the experiment to be sure :-)
About the article: I don't think the ants are similar to cars at all. Drivers have freedom to behave differently, some are in a real hurry and we have different speed of reaction (to use the holes in the exit to wait to the last moment).