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Steven Lane wrote:
>
> A lorry crashed on the M6 motorway (freeway is U.S parlance) in the early
> hours of this mourning, It said on the news that it cost business millions
> of pounds due to the enourmous delays. Why does it take 8 hours to re-open a
> motorway? That's a third of a day, just to move a damaged lorry and it's
> load off the carrigeway. I reckon it's because the police insist in
> documenting every aspect of the crash. Surely there's a better way to deal
> with a crash where people don't have to suffer the disruption and sit in
> traffic jams for hours?
Well, it depends on the cargo. A few years back, a fuel truck crashed on
I-95 and I think it was a couple days before they had that section of
the road open again. If the accident caused serious property loss, I
don't begrudge a certain amount of investigation (though I really think
it's a shame that a little fender bender here basically requires police
involvement, people should trade insurance information, and get back in
their cars and go - though I admit that the time a truck rear ended me,
I waited for the police, though I got off the road immediately, and we
ended up driving to the next exit and going to a gas station to call the
highway patrol - which still gave the trucker a ticket). I've seen
people leave their fender bendered cars in the middle of the road
waiting for the cops. I learned that if your vehicle was driveable, you
got it out of the way (though some states have idiotic laws requiring
you to not move vehicles until the police arrive - usually these are
pretty rural states, states with big cities pretty quickly figure out
that you need to get accidents cleared as quickly as possible).
I'd also ask how many other vehicles were involved. A Scottish fellow I
worked with a few years back was always telling stories of accidents on
the motorways which involved hundreds of cars, I'm not sure how much was
exaggeration, how much was compression of years of incidents, or what,
but I feel like I've heard about as many many vehicle crashes in the UK
from him as I've heard about in the news for the entire US (and many of
them [in the UK] where they had to use dental records to identify all
the casualties). Do your trucks come equipped with brakes?
Why does it take so long? Because the costs aren't properly assigned. If
the costs of the lost productivity were assigned properly, and someone
would invent the Star Trek Phaser, I bet you'd see the cops
disintegrating wrecks if they weren't off the road before the cop got
there. Of course one problem is that just because 100,000 people whose
pay averages to $20 per hour are delayed an hour doesn't mean that
$2,000,000 were "lost" (well, actually it is, but no one finds fewer
dollars in their bank account, they just have less time to watch TV when
they get home, or their work project isn't completed quite as quickly,
but of course with "free" overtime, the company doesn't care as much as
you think they should).
One thing that I have become convinced about also wrto accidents and the
traffic tie ups is that "rubbernecking" is not as big a factor in the
tie up as we might think. My hypothesis is that the faster traffic
travels on a road, the higher the carrying capacity of that road is. Why
is this? Because for one thing, we don't in fact keep a distance which
is proportional to the speed we're traveling (contrary to driver's ed),
plus, the vehicle is a fixed length. What this means is that even a
momentary disruption of traffic flow on a "full" highway can lead to a
traffic tie up. Why? Well, when the traffic in the lane which is
disrupted slows down or comes to a halt, the carrying capacity of that
lane is instantly reduced BELOW the current load. You immediately have a
slug of vehicles which don't fit on the road. Since they don't just
conveniently disappear, they can easily result in a section of road
where traffic is effectively permanently stopped. Of course this section
of road happens to also be the lead up to an accident if that was the
disruption, which creates the appearance that the folks are stopping to
look, when in fact, all they're really doing is stopping because the guy
in front stopped. There are also factors (like, "well, the guy in front
stopped so I should also") which can also drag out the recovery from the
disruption even of the road wasn't "full". I keep thinking of writing a
traffic simulator to test my hypothesis, but have never sat down to do
it.
Frank
(who has WAY too much experience with motor vehicle accidents - but hey,
today's excitement in the apartment complex was just a little fire,
nothing to worry about, just a few scorched shingles).
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: M6 Crash
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| (...) I can only recall one really big crash over here from memory, and that was a multiple pile up in fog. They had to spray numbers on the burnt out wrecks so they could tell which was which. (...) Your quite right. (...) I agree here as well. But (...) (23 years ago, 28-May-01, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | M6 Crash
|
| A lorry crashed on the M6 motorway (freeway is U.S parlance) in the early hours of this mourning, It said on the news that it cost business millions of pounds due to the enourmous delays. Why does it take 8 hours to re-open a motorway? That's a (...) (24 years ago, 24-May-01, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, lugnet.loc.uk)
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