How even one smart driver can unjam traffic jams

Stuck on long commutes, engineer William Beaty did some elegant analysis of driver behavior and its consequences. He figured out how even one driver can sometimes unjam traffic jams.

I have tried Beaty’s methods myself on a few stretches of San Francisco Bay Area freeway where traffic tends to jam up. And while I can’t unjam a big jam, there have been times when I’ve been able to unjam small jams, or at least make a jam smaller or get it to move faster.

A lot of NLP is about changing your own behavior in order to change other people’s behavior and help them get better outcomes. So I like to think of Beaty’s driving technique as NLP for traffic.

To understand more about how you can unjam traffic, and see diagrams, visit Beaty’s website TrafficWaves.org

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