>Suppose you’re on a 2-lane (each way) highway and one lane is closed up ahead due to construction. Now the flow rate of your lane is cut in half (or there are twice as many cars in line in front of you, depending on how you want to look at it).
What I observe is that the speed is reduced to one twentieth of the speed, not just half. This is because people are merging very slowly while jostling resulting in needless braking. If everyone could agree upon a proper zipper merge, the speed for everyone would go up many times.
Or imagine a traffic signal at the merge point that only lets one lane go through for a minute each. The overall flow rate would be much higher than what it is without such a signal.
Discounting this based on theoretical flow rate (as if removing one lane reduces real traffic flow by only 50%) shows that the author totally ignores real traffic scenarios completely at odds with the title of the article.
From the article:
>Suppose you’re on a 2-lane (each way) highway and one lane is closed up ahead due to construction. Now the flow rate of your lane is cut in half (or there are twice as many cars in line in front of you, depending on how you want to look at it).
What I observe is that the speed is reduced to one twentieth of the speed, not just half. This is because people are merging very slowly while jostling resulting in needless braking. If everyone could agree upon a proper zipper merge, the speed for everyone would go up many times.
Or imagine a traffic signal at the merge point that only lets one lane go through for a minute each. The overall flow rate would be much higher than what it is without such a signal.
Discounting this based on theoretical flow rate (as if removing one lane reduces real traffic flow by only 50%) shows that the author totally ignores real traffic scenarios completely at odds with the title of the article.