Years ago, I had a high-traffic 30-45 minute highway commute five days a week. During this time I implemented a system that entailed driving an average pace rather than speeding up and breaking when the cars ahead of me came to a halt. It was fascinating because I found that this method eased up on both my frustrations and allowed for other cars in the vicinity to ease up as well (or merge over or exit, as was needed). The other part that was fascinating was how angry it sometimes made the drivers behind me. People directly behind me would at times start honking if I too-slowly accelerated to reach the car ahead. Keep in mind this is stop-and-go traffic: we're not going anywhere in a hurry. Speeding up and slamming on breaks only exacerbates a slow traffic flow, it never seemed to help it. However, I also noticed that sometimes the cars around me began to create gaps of their own, and on occasion there seemed to be a radius of easing traffic surrounding my car. Or was I just imagining it?
Turns out, I wasn't. Nor was I the first to have discovered this. In the late 1990s, William Beatty, an electrical engineer from Seattle, started chronicling a similar theory, along with proof of how and why it works (in a detailed website). He's been implementing those same driving methods for years in an attempt to get people to react more logically when they drive. If we all eased up, traffic would flow more smoothly, we would emit fewer carbon emissions, AND we would get where we need to go more quickly.
Beatty has spent about 20 years experimenting and documenting breaking up "waves" in traffic, complete with videos and explanations on how to use these systems. His theory of these traffic waves are in line with what many in the traffic-studying industry have discovered: certain events (including simple irrational miscalculations) cause a ripple affect of decreasing speeds in traffic and that ripple affect can lead to complete standstills. Beatty's methods allow for "absorbing" the waves, i.e., moderating the speed of traffic and encouraging people to allow for more absorption of the vacillating speeds encountered when cars are more tightly together.
In addition to practicing this in traffic, you can start to test this at home. Error-Prone, the winning entry for a competition put on by the Swedish Transport Authority in concert with a Swedish game developer, allows you to control the cars on the screen with your keyboard to see how constant speeds vs. oscillating speeds affect the flow of traffic. It's meant to be a case for self-driving vehicles, but also works to help us understand our individual impact on the collective whole in a driving scenario.
One of the greatest wins with self-driving cars is the elimination of the human factor altogether. Technology allows the cars to calculate speeds and distances in a way that keeps traffic moving at a steady pace. This reality doesn't change tomorrow's commute, however. Driverless vehicles as the norm or majority is still relatively far in the future; the methods Beatty describes can be used the next time you find yourself behind the wheel. The more of us who practice sound driving techniques in our daily commutes (merging like a zipper being one example) means that collectively we can change the flow of traffic.
This is empowering, especially if you have 45 minutes to think about it every morning.