logoalt Hacker News

appreciatorBusyesterday at 8:09 PM3 repliesview on HN

Yes. If people are constantly moving into your appropriate head way this is doubtless annoying but the correct response is allow yourself to decelerate slowly to re-open that space again, repeat as many times as necessary, even if it means a bunch of agros end up in front of you. Better for them to be in front where you can see them, than behind or to the side, were you can't.


Replies

mlyleyesterday at 8:41 PM

Yah. There's something that feels unjust about it -- the perception that the people cutting are getting something over on you -- that causes us to want to behave badly.

But even if 2 dozen people go around you and creep into that following space, you've been cost like 45 seconds at worst. Better not to play the game.

show 3 replies
janalsncmtoday at 12:47 AM

I try to maintain a constant speed in traffic, even if other people are speeding up and slamming on the brakes around me. Something like the average speed of traffic. Slamming on the pedals isn’t going to get you there faster.

Even if I do need to brake, speeding up more slowly also usually means I have more buffer time to slow down too.

cucumber3732842today at 1:03 AM

This algorithm is garbage because it puts no value upon the danger cause by other traffic changing lanes when they would not have otherwise.

You're just going to wind up being approximately the slowest person on the road, which is fine if you're constantly trying to go slower to build space but this means that a bunch of traffic that would have not gone around you will do so. This ups the danger vs a steady flow less all these lane changes because every "thing" other people do is an opportunity to do it badly.

Kinda ironic when you consider that TFA was about detecting dangerous merge situations in the data.