Alltop.com

Great graphic! What always gets me is that 90% of the time traffic is caused by people slowing down to rubberneck when an accident has been completely moved out of the way.

The infographic, particularly the funnel effect, could be an analogy used in Kanban for limiting your work in progress (WIP). The phenomena is not unique to just traffic and water.

Regards,
Derek
http://thecriticalpath.info

Even more interesting -- the wave actually moves. That is, the front of the wave (where cars begin to accelerate again) moves backward. In the above example, car B is the initial front of the wave, but accelerates after only a few seconds, once the idiot in car A is out of the way. The next car, seeing car B accelerate, then accelerates, and so on. However, because the rate at which information moves back along the road ("I see brake lights ahead") is faster than the rate at which people can resume their previous speed, the wave front moves backward. By the time car #4 gets to accelerate again, the wavefront has moved back a long distance from the Car A/B interaction that started things... so car #4 can't see what started the wave in the first place. "Gee, traffic was stopped for no reason... and just started moving again." Think of it like lightning and thunder: the longer the time between deceleration and acceleration, the farther you were from the incident that started it.

Somewhere in the mix is almost always some Prius-driving loser driving under the speed limit to max out their mileage...