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THIS this so much. Look far out ahead and if you see traffic compressing then slow down sooner so as to try to make that compression vanish for those behind you.


The tradeoff for the compression 'vanishing' is longer times pressing your breaks, travelling slower overall, and leaving your engine running for more of the time.

Also you then just leave a bigger gap in front of you for somebody to jump into, forcing you to break more and go further back to maintain your distance. This in turn just winds up the drivers behind you who end up overtaking you. All this chaos becasue you think you are helping by 'reducing compression'.

In heavy traffic I much prefer to quickly catch the car in front up and then sit stationary with my engine off. Much more efficient and less polluting than spending the whole time with your ewngine on managing gaps and braking distances at low speeds.


> The tradeoff for the compression 'vanishing' is longer times pressing your breaks, travelling slower overall, and leaving your engine running for more of the time.

What? Your travel time does not get longer, and if the traffic is merely slow then this "leaving your engine running for more of the time" is nonsense. Even if it's stop and go and you have a car that kills the engine every time you come to a dead stop, that will use more gas because you're making inefficient use of the electrical system (charging and discharging the battery more than you should have to).

> Also you then just leave a bigger gap in front of you for somebody to jump into,

Sure, so as earlier you have to pay attention and not allow that.

> In heavy traffic I much prefer to quickly catch the car in front up and then sit stationary with my engine off. Much more efficient

Doubt.

And besides doubting your claim about efficiency, you're doing exactly that which most helps the pressure wave endure, and thus you're causing more delays for more people, and more people to have to brake hard, and more engine stop/start cycles, all of which means more pollution overall not less, etc.

You really have to think systemically.


Lube the road.




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