Bay Area Traffic Unhackable?

So, as an accidental "affluent suburbanite" here in the Tri-valley, I am lucky enough to have an hour long commute to and from work each day (note that is 2 hours total, each day). My journey begins on Interstate 580 at the 680 split, headed west out of the valley, and into the city of Hayward (10 mi, 10-15 mins), then winding through the streets of Hayward (3.5 mi, 15-20 mins) I finally make it to CA-92, which eventually goes over the bay (Hayward/San Mateo Bridge) (14 mi, 15 mins), and then on to 101 South (2 mi, 10 minutes). This cycle repeats in the opposite direction, except that the 2 mi jog North on 101 is about 15 minutes than it is headed South in the morning.

So obviously when I saw this site ( I think linked through Digg a few days ago), I was very interested in the possibilities of hacking the traffic on my daily journey in an effort to shave a few minutes off my commute, and maybe even a few points off my blood pressure.

If you don't want to read it, the very brief and admittedly poor summary of the article (ca. 1998) is: Large gaps between cars on the freeway, or "anti-traffic", consume stop-n-go waves of traffic, and allow traffic to mesh (gear or zipper-like) properly at merges. The author posits that even a single car creating a decently sized anti-traffic bubble can eliminate some nasty stop-n-go traffic waves.

Now, this seems pretty obvious when you sit and read it, but try imagining what its actually like out there on the Freeways. What's that? Imagination broken? Well, lets see if we can give it a kickstart. Imagine your going home from work on a late fall day like today; its 6:00pm, rush hour. It's dark and chilly outside. You make your way to the freeway. You fight your way out off the on-ramp into the far right lane, you get out of the merge, and eventually (if you're not driving on 101), your speed picks up to about 55-60 mph. That's all well and good, except that there are tons of people on the road, all wanting to change lanes, all wanting desperately to go 70, when traffic is still moving less than the speed limit. You're a mere few feet from the bumper of the guy in front of you, he's the same from the guy in front of him. Likewise, is the guy behind you; his headlights barely show in your rear-view mirror. Suddenly, a brake light goes on several cars ahead of you, the guy behind the breaking car, taken by surprise in the middle of his cell phone call hits his brakes, same with the guy behind him, and so on and so on, each car having to break more than the one ahead of it. Finally, you hit your brakes hard to avoid the stopped/stopping traffic in front of you, as you look up in your rear-view praying desparately that the guy behind you was paying attention, has good brakes, or at least has insurance. Then all of a sudden, traffic is back moving at the sub-speed limit rate it was before, as if nothing happened. You're puzzled, and cautious knowing this can't be right. You give yourself some room between you and the guy behind you. Suddenly, you start noticing every asshole with a BMW, Lexus, or Mercedes using your cushion space as a bounce point to get around a slow car in the lane next to you. You get pissed: "How dare they!?", you accelerate a bit more until you're right behind the guy in front of you again. Suddenly, several cars ahead of you, brake lights go on......

Yeah, you get the point. That's what its like to drive in the Bay Area, presuming your lucky enough to avoid a car accident, the errant hilariously-out-of-place-debris in the number 2 lane, or the World's Longest Parking Lot. So, on Monday, I decided I would not be one of these typical drivers. I'd stifle the competitive driver in me, I'd create my anti-traffic bubbles, and ride the fortunes of smooth traffic all the way into work!

Aww, sometimes I'm so naively enthused it's cute. I'm like a 16 year old eagerly awaiting his first tax return thinking about all the things I can do with that return money.

I've tried, really I have. Both to and from work, I've taken extra precaution to keep my anti-traffic gaps in front of me. I've tried making them moderate (6 car lengths), and bigger (1/4 mile), but alas, it doesn't seem to work. Those spaces quickly fill up with other cars, despite what our author claims:

"But what about the adjacent lane? Won't they all fill my empty space? Nope. A few do change lanes, then they rush to the end of the empty space. This filters out the aggressive drivers from the adjacent lane, letting them move to my lane at the end of my space, and leaving sane ones next to my empty space. They don't change lanes. They don't care that there's a huge empty space growing and shrinking right beside them. They form a big plug, and aggressive drivers behind them cannot get to my big empty space."

The above may hold true in Seattle, but I'm afraid it does not hold true in the congested Bay Area. There are simply too many cars, too little lanes, too many junctions, that it is impossible to maintain any meaningful "anti-traffic" gap. Instead, these gaps are just traffic sinks. Cars are attracted to them, and nature continues to abhor its vaccuum. It's too bad too, because the author isn't smoking crack; he's on to something. The anti-traffic bubbles really do work in areas where the flow of traffic is somewhat constant, like on the San Mateo bridge where you have roughly 10 miles of freeway with no exits or onramps; just straight away. I've readily observed the anti-traffic phenomenon at work here. You see, the western-most span of this bridge is a high-rise which allows for shipping traffic in the bay to pass under it. When you're coming down the high rise headed East, you get a nice look at the remaining 7 miles of flat span ahead of you. During rush hour at night, you can easily identify many of these stop-n-go waves off in the distance. If you then get yourself a nice anti-traffic bubble, you can ride the rest of the bridge without ever having to brake, despite the car ahead of you doing so.

But so what? It was a smooth ride, but you know you could have made it over the bridge 2 minutes quicker if you'd just lane-hopped and kept bumper to bumper with the rest of the traffic. And did it really help anyone out behind you? Maybe, but you know that they're all tail-gating each other, so its just a matter of time before new waves are created behind you. So in reality, for me at least, this just made the commute a bit longer, but a bit less harrowing, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's definitely reminded me how much better it is to not drive at warp speed sandwiched in between cars, but it really hasn't made my commute quicker, or have any meaningful impact on anyone else's commute. Bottom line: the efficacy of this method is inversely proportional to the traffic saturation; therefore, when all possible traffic space is occupied, this method is 0% effective.

So, does this mean that Bay Area traffic is unhackable? Not necessarily, it just means that the anti-traffic bubble approach doesn't work well in such a highly congested area (something I believe the author touches on). Instead, I'll have to look for other ways to hack traffic. For now, I'm stuck with alternative routing, (e.g., taking El Camino Real instead of 101) until something better comes along.