by Leroy on December 30th, 2025.
Many people I've met seem to believe that daily traffic would be easier to handle if other people just did this -- if other drivers just zipper merge, if other drivers just speed up, if other drivers just get over, if other drivers just slow down, if only other drivers just let me in! then this traffic would go away.
There's plenty to analyze about why traffic happens, about how the design of our roads don't alleviate traffic well enough, about how fear shapes the driving habits of regular, everday people, and we could get lost in conversations about how public transportation driven by trained professionals would be so much better, and we could debate regarding how much training should be required to obtain a driver's license, but none of that will do much good to help out with the traffic on our roads right now, today.
The reality is that traffic is not only caused by the amount of drivers, but also by drivers and, most often, a driver is unaware their actions are causing traffic to form. Yes, traffic is caused by drivers making bad decisions, but the bad decisions which create traffic are simpler and easier to miss than you think. Traffic, when assessed without of all the anxiety and hate we have about it, is simply about being forced to slow down when we didn't need to slow down at all.
The reality is that traffic is created by individual drivers on the road through only a select few actions: accelerating, braking, changing lanes, and signaling. To break it down even more: in the majority of cases where traffic is created, it is created because someone slowed down unnecessarily which caused someone behind them to slow down too. That's it, that's how traffic is created. Think about anytime you've had to slowdown 15 mph below the speed limit, from 70 to 55, and then think about what every vehicle had to do behind you -- they had to slow down, and then the person behind them had to slow down, and so on and so on. Depending on the amount of cars, this "wave" of slowdowns can extend for miles.
Acting on this information is something every single reader can do today, right now, and this brings me to define the Golden Rule of Driving: try your best to not slow down the person behind you. If you slow down the person behind you, the person behind them also has to slow down, and so on and so on, until traffic is created.
With all that said, how can I claim that drivers create traffic without also realizing it? Well, it's easy: most drivers pay little attention to their speed in cases where it would help alleviate traffic. With both the Golden Rule of Driving and this little tidbit in mind, I want to use the rest of this article to explore a few common situations I see every day on the road, situations where a driver unintentionally slowed down the driver behind them causing multiple drivers to slowdown too.
Most vehicles do not accelerate from 0-60 mph within one or two seconds, but definitely can speed up to 60 within the time an on-ramp provides. Too often drivers simply don't speed up to match the speed of drivers already on the highway. This means the drivers on the highway either have to change lanes to avoid the slow driver or, worse, when no lanes are available, they have to slowdown causing everyone around them to slow down too. In fact, this is so common that many highway entrances are usually the source of traffic regardless of whether the entrance was from a regular road or another highway.
When exiting the highway there's an expectation that one will have to slowdown but most drivers do this prematurely. Many drivers start decelerating while on the highway well before crossing the exit. This means that every driver behind them must slow down even if they aren't exiting too. The solution is to wait until the vehicle has exited the highway before slowing down.
This limits the flow of traffic for everyone behind the driver. Now instead of entering the merge at 20-30 mph in hopes of reaching 45-55 mph, everyone now enters the merge at 0 mph because they were forced to stop and wait. This both creates traffic on the highway because the merge lane is merging much too slowly and also causes traffic in the form of a line of stopped cars waiting to merge.
Too often I see drivers brake when there's no need to brake at all. On the highway there's almost no reason to use brakes at all if you are driving correctly, i.e. not driving within a car-length of the driver in front of you, or if there's no traffic already. Anyway, a driver who brakes causes other drivers to brake too and this slows drivers down unnecessarily.
I could list several more cases where drivers slowdown too much or otherwise create situations which cause people to slowdown, but the above four are a good start for anyone who wants to ponder my Golden Rule of Driving. These situations are easy to spot and you will see these errors if you look for them. Hopefully you can share them too because without public transportation the only recourse against traffic is to educate regular drivers against accidentally creating more traffic.