“Hell is other people”

by philg

Sartre never tried to drive around the Bay Area so it is tough to know where he got his inspiration for the line “Hell is other people.”  Certainly he would have been inspired by my trip from Berkeley to San Francisco today.  Traversing a few miles of I-80 here (the Bay Bridge) took 2 hours, longer than flying over the entire stretch of I-80 that traverses Utah (from Wyoming to Nevada).  No accidents; just a normal flow Sunday around noon.


From the wheel of my 1992 Honda Civic, the subject of an experiment by my hosts in how long a car can run without ever being washed or maintained, I had ample opportunity to observe sailboats in the bay and boat-sized SUVs on the bridge.  It seems that sports cars have vanished from highways around San Francisco.  If you’re seldom going to exceed 20 mph or travel more than 5 seconds before stopping, it doesn’t make sense to have a manual transmission.  You need to allow 2 hours for each trip and therefore you’ll want an upright driving position and very comfortable seats.  On-board espresso and Diet Coke machines would be nice (along with a bathroom to match) as would an autopilot for traffic jams.  Cruise control isn’t much use in the Bay Area because mostly it is designed to work at speeds of 30 mph and greater.  What you really want is a system that will go at speeds of 3 mph and less, inching your car along in a traffic jam.


Speaking of inching… my hosts also have a new Honda Civic hybrid.  It isn’t quite as glorious as imagined.  It can’t inch its way forward in a traffic jam by dint of electric power.  If the car is moving, the combustion engine is running.  The electric stuff is there to provide extra acceleration for leadfooted drivers.  So basically you could have a car that was just as fuel efficient if you were willing to tolerate sluggish acceleration (which in the Bay Area wouldn’t be an issue since there is seldom more than 20 feet between you and the car in front of you).  Also the entire ventilation system shuts down if the engine shuts down at a traffic light.  Finally the system isn’t very smart.  If you accelerate to 30 mph and then stop at a light, the engine is shut off.  If you need to creep forward a bit and then stop for 2 minutes, the engine continues to run because you never got over a threshold speed.  My hosts say that what they really want is a button on the steering wheel that will tell the car “okay to go to sleep now”.

22 thoughts on ““Hell is other people””

  1. Philip –

    The problem of how to make traffic more efficient is quite important. All the solutions which involve “everyone” doing something are impractical, as are all the solutions which involve changing the roads themselves. The key to traffic is that people slow down to maintain an appropriate-sized gap between cars. If cars had a mechanism to maintain an optimal gap automatically it would help. I call this “caravan mode“.

    People sometimes think hanging back and leaving a nice gap “smooths” traffic and makes it more efficient. This is the “caravan fallacy“.

    Of possible interest…

    Ole

  2. Ole,
    Your idea is not unlike the failed attempt cities have made to encourage drivers to prioritize their lane based on when they plan to exit the freeway. This idea works on paper but fails in practice because a few bad apples ruin the bunch. Automating the system, as you describe could help but I am doubtful. We can never rely on a technical mechanism to override human nature; and some people just have to pass everybody.
    That said, I do think you are correct in saying it is inappropriate to slow down and generate more traffic latency when stuck in traffic as it simply worsens the problem. Hmm…perhaps traffic is more similar to packets than I thought…now all we need is QoS. 🙂
    Cheers,
    –David

  3. If road traffic is similar to network packets then we need to think about upgrading the switching capacity, i.e. allow hwy interchanges and exit ramps to operate at or above the highway speed.

  5. You can’t generalize this unpleasant experience to the whole Bay Area. The bridges are relatively quick these days during the commute hours; unfortunately many people are out of work. Weekends are a different story, the approaches to the bridges are usually snarled. You picked the worst time to take the trip you described. BART is very fast for a trip to the city or even to the airport when the bridge is crowded like this.

  6. My Toyota Prius hybrid does let you inch along on electric power in traffic. In fact, I’ve gotten to experience this a few times on Route 128 around Boston. The engine doesn’t turn on until you reach 10mph unless you accelerate hard. Eventually, after lots of electric-only creeping, the battery gets low and the engine comes on to recharge not to move the car forward.

  7. We drove Seattle to SF and back over the last couple of days and were surprised to note that CA traffic seemed to move more efficiently then WA traffic (maybe one or more of- fewer drivers hunkered down in the passing lanes, faster speeds, 55 speed limit for trucks, more agressive drivers, better roads, better engineering?) Of course our trips over the Bay Bridge were late Friday night, not at peak travel time- traffic was NOT moving slowly. The caravan theory works for mass-transit- where all the trains are hooked together, and articulated buses. Bart’s great though- Berkeley to SF in 20 minutes or so- what’s to beat? Plus you can mix with other people, Sartre was wrong:)

  8. Traffic here does indeed suck. But it’s nothing like it was back in 1999 and 2000.

    If you want to go for a glider ride while you’re in the Bay Area, let me know. I’d love to take you up.

  9. Philip, I think you wrote once that SF was “the best city in America” or something to that effect. That was probably a while ago… has your outlook changed? Where would you live (not neccessarily just the US) if you had to pick from scratch?

    P.S.- Re: thing beat about BART- the asinine policy they had before (’94-’98) about no bikes on BART during “commute hours”. Luckily Brompton’s US importer is in palo alto…

  11. I would have taken BART but I wanted to go to Golden Gate Park and bike around before meeting my friends at Yank Sing. So I had the folding bike in the trunk of my friends’ Honda Civic. One problem with BART is that it really doesn’t go anywhere within the city of San Francisco. And I don’t think the MUNI trams and buses run very frequently on Sundays. And as a tourist in a society without wireless Internet it would be tough to figure out what bus to take and when it would leave (compare to Japan where they have little iMode phone browser apps that let you plan trips from PointA to PointB via public transit).

  12. public transit can work well without wifi, as long as you have very visible stops, with route maps and schedules for the line at each stop, and network-wide maps at the larger stops and on the bus/tram/train. no one takes the bus in my town because the town won’t do these things, so no one knows where the bus stops are or what time to expect a bus or where it goes.

  13. Studies have been done on this “wave” phenomena – the problem is the addition of reaction time to each car in a line of traffic. Suppose someone cust you off in the high speed lane. It takes you a half second to react, and although in this example you only have to slow slightly to let the person into the lane safely, a half second has been “used.” The person behind you, however, needs a half second to react to your slowing down – now the cumulative time is a second – and so he/she has to slow a little bit more than you to maintain a safe distance. Go twelve cars back and you’re talking seven seconds – at this point the person has to come to a complete stop to avoid hitting the car ahead. And the reverse is true when this person starts off from the stop – it takes seven seconds for the fourteenth car back to respond to the first car “stopped” and begin moving.

    Sorry, I have no idea where I got his information several years ago.

  14. Hmm. So, to compensate for the phenomenon Stan mentioned, cars would need to apply a form of forward error correction, and communicate among themselves.

    Even if only some cars in a column were network aware and could share info (the lead car acting as a ‘master’), you would shave off a cumulative half second for every pair of cars that were directly in series, so they could move in unison.

    This is a naively pessimistic solution though. Better results could be obtained (for each individual car) if the half-second reaction time can be *reduced* as well, even if the car immediately ahead was an old fashioned ‘stupid’ model, or is being driven manually. Driving in stop-and-go traffic is exactly the sort of mind-bogglingly boring task that many people would rather a computer did anyway, so let a computer take charge of matching the car’s movement to the one in front of it by using lidar or something similar. It’s not a ‘boil the ocean’ plan, each driver with this feature realizes an immediate personal benefit, and so does everyone behind them.

  15. Phil, everyone knows the traffic in the Bay Area is horrid and that the only way to trully fix it is for people to radically change their habits and preferences. That is not going to happen any time soon.

    What about WiFi around there… you’d think with the density of hi-tech firms and rich people and interest in the Internet that you could fry an egg with all the WiFi in the air. Just curious.

  16. Phil-

    I recommend http://www.transitinfo.org‘s TakeTransit planner. Pick where you want to go and when and it’ll give you a customized itinerary. Invaluable for my Bay Area non-car trips 🙂

    Hope it works.

    BTW, if you research traffic-related stuff, I’m interested…e-mail me 🙂

  17. “Also the entire ventilation system shuts down if the engine shuts down at a traffic light.”
    Only if you keep the car in “ECON” mode. There is an on/off button for this (marked ECON) on the dash, just below the AC controls. Sometimes it helps to read the manual.

  18. You picked a uniquely inopportune time to be driving into SF – right before a big Giants game on a weekend.

    http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/preview?gid=230810126
    For what it’s worth, about a month ago I was back in the south bay (Milpitas/Sunnyvale/Mountain View) for a week after having moved out of the area about a year ago. Traffic seemed a little lighter than as I had remembered it, probably due to ongoing layoffs and (to a lesser extent) people moving out. The consensus among people in the office is that commute times are faster than they were a couple years ago. Certainly nothing like this bumper to bumper stuff, but maybe that’s because where I work (Cisco) people have the sense to come in a little later (a bit after 9AM on average) and leave a little later (maybe 6PM or later). In a week of driving around I didn’t get stuck in any slow traffic.

  19. Philip is right about BART-to-bus from our house in Berkeley to Golden Gate park on Sundays. It can take two hours. It’s the bus part that slows you down.

    And yes, Philip, on the hybrid, you can leave the air-conditioning on, but Joel doesn’t like it set that way.

    And while you might be able to have a fuel efficient car by simply sacrificing acceleration, I doubt such a car would sell. Electric cars (aka golf carts) are efficient, but practically no one want them. Consumers want a car that satisfies all their transportation needs, from stop-and-go traffic to cruising at 80 mph. The hybrid allows this while still getting extremely good gas mileage.

Comments are closed.