Traffic Jam (Score 1)

There are a number of contributing factors to this phenomenon. For every 1 minute that an incident is blocking, it takes 3 minutes to recover and for traffic to flow normally again. Blocking incidents can include, buses that are stopped, police pulling over a vehicle, emergency vehicles, wrecks, obstructions (trees, water over road way, etc.) This paired with driver inattention, causes several traffic delays. Also when you have just 1 lane blocked you loose 60% of you capacity for that roadway. So now on an already congested route you have just decreased efficiency by 60%. And the fact that everyone is in a hurry adds a significant time delay as people are not as focused on the conditions that are present on the roadway because of the stress of a slow commute, so the either try to do other things while driving (read a book or magazine, apply makeup, do their taxes, everything but drive) and therefore are not paying the appropriate attention and then get rear ended or rear end someone else, therefore crating an additional blocking incident, compounding the problem. Then there are the people that want to change lanes and no one will let them over so the stop in the lane that they are currently in and hold up all the traffic behind them while waiting to switch lanes. Then there are some people that are not very adept at driving in the first place and are scared to drive the speed limit, and therefore cause backups, this had roughly the same effect as a blocking incident. Failure to properly merge has this same effect as well. These are just some of the factors that can contribute. There are several others, but these are the most common