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Avenue of the Giants Weekend Run - Sat. March 23, 2024

Saturday will be a very full day of cruising from Novato up through the Avenue of the Giants and ending at Eel River Brewing in Fortuna. Sun...

Aggressive And Timid Drivers Cause Traffic Jams

Dr Jorge Laval of the school of civil and environmental engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta conducted research with colleagues at the University of Lyon in France, that found when drivers changed their speed, they caused drivers further back to change their speed so that the change in speed passed like a wave, backwards, through the traffic. The research, which appears in a special edition of the scientific journal "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society," found that timid drivers had the biggest impact because they "shied away" when the car in front started slowing down, and deliberately started driving even more slowly to increase the gap between them which led to cars further behind to slow. Aggressive drivers also caused speed to drop because they braked hard at the last moment to avoid driving into the car in front which resulted their driving more slowly in order to open up a space again.

[Source: Telegraph.co.uk]