Hey I studied this in grad school for a bit, and it really is just "someone does some dumb shit which leads to a cascading wave of additional people doing dumb shit which propagates backwards for miles." Basically when the offered load is getting close to the maximum load, all it takes is one person aggressively changing lanes to throw that section of highway into gridlock, and it will remain that way until the total integrated traffic flux across that incident boundary again falls below the critical offered load inflection point.

Basically, pick a lane and just stay in it. Maintain proper following distance. Counterintuitively, the following distance should be for the speed you want to drive, so even in traffic it should be like 5+ car lengths even though you are going slow. This is because it reduces the offered load, and once that number falls below the critical point, speeds will increase again. Bumper to bumper traffic basically prevents that from happening because it dampens the ability for a "speedup" wave to propagate.

Of course this is all impossible for humans. All it takes is a few idiots to throw off the balance.

It all starts with someone in the passing lane, not passing, and one or more pissed off people behind them :)

The pissed off people trying to get around causes the wave of people behind them to brake and it snowballs from there.

People drive too close to each other, someone has to slow down and then the car behind slows down a bit more. Repeat until you get to the point someone completely stops. Then the next car stops for slightly longer.

If you leave a safe distance then it wouldn't happen.

You are thr traffic.

Only ever have to ask, my friend

Heres an overview shot of a traffic pulse.

One person brakes for no reason which leads to everyone else braking. The pulse travels despite there being nothing there. The longer it can take for someone to start up again also can delay the whole thing.

Reaction times of humans.

Most traffic jams actually act as a kind of compression wave moving backwards through traffic. Something as small as a squirrel running across the road can cascade into an hour-long jam.

One person brakes, then the person behind them, then the person behind them, but each time they are getting closer to each other (nobody stays equidistant from the car in front of them when braking). This causes a greater and greater slowdown as more cars are compacted into a tighter space, which travels backwards in traffic like a wave. Often the person who caused it doesn't even realize anything happened.

A lot of mapping software actually estimates a given traffic slowdown by treating traffic as a fluid with a wave moving backwards through it.

3 fucking seconds

The answer is a simple 3 second gap.

That's it, just 3-mississippi (or 3-onethousand) seconds behind the car in front of you and most of the avoidable jams go away.

A few years ago, I was bitching and moaning about a jam, and my pal just said "you're not in traffic, you are traffic".

I know it's nothing more than a cheeky soundbite but just reframing it like that and knowing I'm part of the problem rather than the exception has made me a lot calmer on slow moving roads.

Plus it has encouraged me to either use public transport more, or just drive to a park-and-ride a mile or three out, and run the rest - facilities permitting of course.

The people at the front are morons and probably in the wrong lane.

Traffic is a "thing" because the slowest common perambulator is always in front

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/9/4278

TLDR: modeling traffic as a gas leads to fairly accurate predictions. If that doesnt mean anything to you, here's a decent visualization of how gasses move around in a system. In this analogy, each of the gas particles models a car on the road. https://youtu.be/Hr5Baj3lXFA

It's usually a complex crowd effect created by many participants trying to maneuver among each other in slightly disperate ways.

In Portland OR, it really is because some dingbat slowed down to 20 MPH on the interstate for literally no fucking reason at all.

99% of traffic like this is caused by people following too closely.

It's the people not zipper merging correctly. You have idiots entering that are not up to speed and you have idiots breaking for the idiots not up to speed.

On ramps should be required to have their lane not end abruptly which causes the panic. The on ram should continue for at least a 1/4 mile.

CGP grey did a video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE

Basically one car breaking too much will make the following brake even more and so on until one stops and there's a jam. There is no clear reason like a road blockage or an accident, just compounding slow down.

Its because of two things. One is that people hog the passing lane or try to pass slowly so it takes them a few minutes to overtake a few cars, and also because people drive at different speeds. Some people drive at the speed that feels comfortable, others drive the state imposed speed limit. This creates pockets of dense traffic, and then people try to pass, but there is always the person who tries to pass as slow as possible because they are going a few mph over the speed limit.

Its really just a bad combination of laws, and drivers who are terrified of breaking the law, and people who dont know how to drive correctly in a way to reduce traffic. Also many people are just never consider that others also need to use the roads. They don't care about traffic. Some people also have health issues, like blindness, or mental handicaps, which means driving at interstate speeds is about all they can muster.