Mark Wagner - Yet Another Blog

If you’re like me you’ve probably sat in your fair share of traffic jams. I make a daily commute and experience a varying degree of traffic patterns. On random days I can zip right home without any hitting any traffic or I’ll hit a wall of traffic causing me to be late getting home. Usually these are caused by someone getting pulled over or in some sort of accident

Today I want to focus focus on a common traffic jam caused by phantom accidents. You’ve probably experienced many of these without even realizing it. Let me explain to you what I mean.

PHANTOM ACCIDENTS
A phantom accident is when you’re driving along and all of a sudden you notice the cars in front of you are either completely stopped or are in a slow crawl. You line up right behind them wondering what type of accident you’re going to see. Most of the time it is a simple fender-bender that has caused all this traffic. You slowly creep along with the rest of the cars around you while wishing you burnt a new CD since you’ve had the same one in your CD player for the last two months. You finally get to the end of the traffic jam but what do you see? Nothing at all. What was all that traffic for?

You most likey just experienced a phantom accident.

Here is how the accident initially happened:

As you can see the accident ahead has caused the cars behind it to start stacking up. As the cars come from the back they just add to the pile of cars. You probably just got onto the road about this time and are thinking to yourself, “Wow! Today must be a light traffic day!”

In this next image the traffic accident has been cleared up:

You’ll notice that the stack of cars is slowing gaining more and more cars at the end while the front cars slowly peel off.

The next image is where you, the driver, come into the picture:

Now here you come in your new purple car. You hit the end of the stack of cars thinking it is your everyday accident causing the traffic. Little do you know that the accident has been cleared up awhile ago. So you creep along.

In this next image you are now stuck in the middle of the wave:

As you see you are almost out of the stack of cars. Notice the position of your car in this image compared to where the other cars were in the previous images. In the first image this part of the road didn’t have any traffic. Now you are sitting in the middle of the traffic jam.

Eventually you finally get to the front of the wave anticipating some sort of accident of police activity but you see nothing.

You would think that after the accident has been cleared up that there would be no reason that this traffic jam would continue. It is rather simple though if you think about it. You stop because the car in front of you has stopped. This in turn makes the car behind you stop, which in turn makes the car behind that one stop and so forth. The only way to clear up the traffic jam would be to have all the cars move at the same time but that could never happen since you’re always waiting for the person in front of you to move.

Finally the car in front of you moves. With the slight delay it takes for you to realize this and then step on the gas, you slowly start picking up speed as the cars behind you follow suit. As soon as the number of cars at the front of the traffic jam start outnumbering the cars that are still stacking up at the end of the traffic jam, the traffic can start to dissolve.

(And I don’t make a living as a graphic designer )