The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Keys to post-I-85 life: Stay in your lane, mind your manners
A quarter of a million vehicles will be dispersed over Atlanta’s streets and highways with the collapse of I-85. That means we’ll be getting up-close-and-personal with other drivers, even more than we already are.
Motorists will be traversing along more slowly on unfamiliar routes all tied up in a grinding commuting dance.
Commuters are creatures of habit, and now that their I-85 habit has been sidetracked, they must learn new ways to get around.
That, of course, is filling up surrounding roads.
According to Andrew Heath, the state traffic engineer, Cheshire Bridge Road went from 18,000 vehicles a day to 40,000. Peachtree Road from Midtown to Buckhead went from 40,000 to 55,000. And I-285 traffic is up 50 percent during some periods. And that’s the good news. Next week is going to get worse as schools open again after spring break, unleashing students, parents and school employees back on the roads.
Part of the solution will come from traffic engineers who will try to move more cars through limited tubes. But another big part of the equation will be the driving public. To sum it up: “Don’t be a jerk. Please.” But I’ll get back to that later. Engineers are looking to re-time
traffic lights on key routes, Heath said, “devoting a lot more green time” to roads taking the brunt of I-85’s traffic.
“We’re trying to push as many drivers through,” he said, meaning lights on major thoroughfares may be devoted up to 80 percent green time during the regular 180-second or 210-second light revolutions. That’s a good thing, unless you are at a cross street.
Drivers are being urged to take MARTA, telecommute, carpool and change their commuting times. However, a study of traffic patterns after the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis in 2007 found that commuters did not switch to public transportation or carpooling.
What the study did find was commuters left home earlier for work — not later — because people largely like coming in at the same time they always did.
Tom Vanderbilt, who wrote the bestselling “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us),” said in an email: “The greatest predictor of the trip someone will take tomorrow, as planners like to say, is the trip they took today. Research has shown that — at least before Waze and the like — most people given radio traffic reports of bad congestion do not choose alternate routes, they stick with what they know. Habitual behavior is a huge force in human psychology — it helps us streamline decision making.
“Even when there are alternative modes of transportation, for many people those loom as uncertainties — so they’ll take a worse version of what they know over a possibly better version of what they don’t.”
But, he added, while Waze and other navigation apps might not “find any magic shortcuts in the Atlanta mess, as all those would have already been utilized by other drivers, it may at least give drivers a bit of piece of mind, knowing they’re on the best route, and having a somewhat accurate picture of their travel time.”
Scott Zehngraff, the assistant state traffic engineer, told me that “a dependable commute is more important to reducing stress than anything else.”
That is, if a 30-minute commute turns into an hour and then goes back to 30, people get honky and aggressive. But if that time averages out to, say, 45 minutes, then people will adjust.
“You may not like it but it does give you a certain stability,” said Zehngraff, a carpooler whose commute has changed in the past week. “Nothing frustrates you more than spikes.”
Drivers are now jumping off onto unfamiliar routes. Sometimes they’ll find clogged arteries. Other times they find movement. But that will repeatedly change as drivers jump around to find a best route that may not exist.
Eventually, the network will find an equilibrium. The Minnesota study said that took about 10 weeks, which is about the time — June 15 — Georgia officials say I-85 will reopen. (We shall see.)
In the meantime, a lot of it is left to us drivers, thousands of people making individual decisions. Studies have shown that the anonymous nature of being encased in thousands of pounds of metal changes people’s personalities. Another study found that a lack of empathy leads to bad driving. That is, if you don’t see other drivers as loving, breathing, fellow beings, then you’ll screw them over in an I-285 minute.
Part of creating an efficient route is having uniformity of drivers. If everyone went roughly the same speed (even a bit slower) and didn’t jump around in lanes, then traffic would move more smoothly. It’s the accelerating and decelerating that causes drivers to hit the brakes and those behind them to do the same. And the next thing you know, the conduit is clogging up.
“If you had a master computer that says all cars go 40 miles an hour and you don’t have the human factor of slowing down and speeding up,” then traffic would flow, Zehngraff said. It’s mixing passive drivers with those who are aggressive that creates the ebbs and flows, with the ebbs usually outnumbering the flows.
So, that leads to the final lesson. For the next few months, please quit jumping in and out of lanes like you’re Dale Earnhardt. It rarely buys you that much more time and ultimately screws up the lemmings behind you.
And I understand, you want to make the traffic light. So you’ll ease forward at yellow and get stuck mid-intersection, messing up other motorists, who will likely do the same. Stop doing that!
Be courteous. Allow a lanechanger into your lane. I know it’s against some drivers’ inner beings, but please, let go of that anti-neighborly urge.