Re: Road Scholar

[Doug Craigen <dcc@ESCAPE.CA>]

P. O. Johnson wrote:
> Our friend and Phys-L colleague William Beaty got a little national exposure
> today in David Plotnikoff's syndicated column Modem Driver (distributed by...

> ...David refers to William's essay Traffic Waves on his web page
> http://www.amasci.com/amateur/traffic/traffic1.html. His intro says the
> fluid dynamics of freeway traffic may sound esoteric but is really an
> extension of the physics that all road warriors process in their heads every

(I finally got a look at this, I'm dealing with literally hundreds of
backlogged email messages.  Anyways, I've put a link to the page for my
class.)

Anyways, Bill's comments about driving in Seattle brought back to mind a
story that was on the front page of the Vancouver Province one day when
I was a paper boy (that would be 25-30 years ago).  The photo showed a
great stretch of empty Seattle freeway followed by an incredible wall of
traffic.  Bill suggested getting state troopers to drive parallel in
order to block fast traffic and eat up traffic waves.  Well, this story
was about three people who objected to the speed limit because they
contended that it was necessary to drive faster than the limit in order
to  get all the traffic through in rush hour.  (You can hardly penalize
people for doing what is necessary for the road to work.)  So to prove
it they did a demonstration where the three of them drove parallel at
the speed limit.  The result was a clear highway in front of them and a
huge backlog behind.  So it has been done at least once, and it
certainly did eat up any traffic waves that were in front of them.
Apparently the frustrated drivers behind were starting to do some pretty
stupid things though.

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Doug Craigen
          Latest Project - the Physics E-source
          http://www.dctech.com/physics/