>>1557899>described like that on the discovery channelI guess that's a simple way to describe it, in a short time before the commercial brakes. But it is VASTLY simplified. By that logic, when there's a road construction and a lane closing, people should just drive several times faster in the open lanes, as traffic is fluid, and by restraining the dimensions, you increase the speed. Obviously it doesn't work that simple. But it might be good for explaining, that there's rule sets to peoples behaviour in traffic.
Take a look at the picture i uploaded, it shows what happens to capacity when reaching a critical point, the bottleneck of a rush hour traffic. See the speed for most vehicles (each dot represent a portion) registered is between 100-120 km/h (~50-60 mph), and that heavily black dotted area, in that speed area, is between 0-4000 cars of traffic flow (x-axis). But then some interesting stuff happens, in measured portions of traffic, where's there's more than 4000 cars per hour, the speed goes all over the damn places. So even thou, the traffic CAN be 90 km/h with 6,000 cars per hour, i rarely is, and never 100-120. People behave differently when traffic gets tight. Not like a fluid AT ALL. Braking, accelerating and weird manoeuvring takes places, in irrational, unpredictable and individual ways. So when traffic capacity (the practical, not theoretical) limit is nearing, speed drops massively, even thou it some times can work at high speed, it might be forced down to a fraction of it, by the drivers behaviour. Instead of the fluid increasing the speed and throughput, it can be so bad that the speed it self halfs, or even quaters the capacity - making the experienced traffic EVEN worse than it actually should be, at the number of cars on the road.
