Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Traffic Works

Episode Date: August 11, 2018

Whether you've been stuck in a traffic jam or forced to merge and avoid road construction, everyone's had a few bad experiences with traffic. But how does traffic actually work? In this episode, Chuck and Josh take a look at traffic waves (and bubbles). Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hi, everybody, Chuck Bryant here of Stuff You Should Know, and welcome to the weekend. It's Saturday, and you know what that means. It's time for another Stuff You Should Know select episode, where Josh and I pick our favorites

from the past 1000 plus episodes and repost them in hopes that you might discover something old. Here we go, something old. Is that a good way to sell something? That's why we call them classics and selects. July 29th, 2010 was a very special day because that is the day we released the episode How Traffic Works.

Yes, traffic, not drug trafficking, but traffic. Car traffic, we all hate it, but you know what? Maybe you should understand it a little better. Really interesting, and I believe Josh even coined his own term, if I'm not mistaken, for this one. Break bubble, dare I say, does my memory serve me? Well, find out by listening right now to How Traffic Works. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is Charles Precious Bryant. How you doing, Precious? This is the podcast based on the novel Push by Sapphire. Yeah, that is absolutely right. Word for word, right? Jerry just got back, because you did a spoiler for Precious.

I'm known for spoilers, aren't I? At least two, it was one. You did your own home. No, there was Six Feet Under, and there was another one I spoiled too, wasn't there? Yeah, there was one you spoiled that was a really old movie, and I was like, come on, that movie's like 15 years old. There's a statute of limitations.

Was it Buckaroo Banzai? Yeah, I think that was it. Yeah, me too. Chuck. Yes? Have you ever been in traffic? That's the best I got. How do you set this up?

Chuck, do you like Steve Winwood? Yeah, I was going to make a traffic the band comment. Have you ever seen the low spark of High Heel Boys? Yeah. Yeah, that's it. Traffic. Seriously, I'm trying to. You know, he was like 16 or 15 when he first joined traffic?

Is that right? Steve Winwood, yeah. That guy's a Lothario. And by that, I mean a prodigy. Yeah. Yeah, traffic. I've been in traffic, buddy. You?

Yes, I have actually been in traffic. Happens a lot, because I don't ride Marta. You ride our fine, fine, crippled public transit system here in Atlanta, don't you? I'm never in traffic anymore. It's really been a huge difference in my life. Yeah. Well, I don't ride Marta because I usually

tend to avoid the smell of urine. And reading while moving makes me sick. So you know, plus I value. I used to value being able to smoke. Yeah, dude. I was just about to say that's why I used to drive. Yeah. And now I'm just like, I just do it out of habit.

But I get caught in traffic a lot, and it stinks. I don't see you on a public transport. You're not that kind of social. No. That's the other thing, too. It's like, oh, hey, we worked together. Let's talk the whole time. No, I don't wear my sunglasses.

It can be dark and raining. And I've told everyone here that if I have my shades on, that means the office is closed. Nice. The store is shut down. That's very nice. Plus, you look super cool. All right, so I'm a jerk that doesn't talk to coworkers now

moving on. Buddy, it's OK. Chuck, do you remember when we recorded quicksand? Yes. Do you remember how we said that there's like a finite amount of stuff out there about quicksand because there's a finite amount to know? Yeah.

There's a finite amount to know about traffic, but there is tons of information out there. Yeah, lots of little side things to know for sure. Yeah, because ultimately, traffic happens in two ways. One is there is simply congestion. There's just too many cars on the road to carry the flow of traffic quickly. Right.

Right? The other way is there is some unpredictable event. Somebody's pulled over. Somebody's broken down. There's a wreck. Weather. Maybe an event that falls under congestion. Police have pulled over a speeder.

People always slow down for that. And that's it. That's it. Those are pretty much the two broad categories that traffic can be created, right? Yeah. And what happens in each of those events is somebody up front puts on their brakes

and that one press of the brakes travels backward all the way through, right? When you have a bunch of different cars in different lanes doing that at the same time, you have traffic. You know what that's called? Traffic wave. Yes.

That's true. It's a domino effect. It's very easy. It is. And I came up with my own idea of describing this. You ready? Oh, boy. OK.

So what I came up with is called a traffic bubble by Josh Clark. So the traffic bubble happens when somebody is driving along and presses their brakes for whatever reason. OK. And just imagine that when they press that brake, this big bubble grows over the car. OK.

And it starts very slowly traveling backward. Uh-huh. And each car behind that car that created the traffic bubble isn't allowed to accelerate again until the traffic bubble has passed through them. Right. But then the further back the traffic bubble goes, the more it dissipates until eventually

the people far enough back don't have to go through the traffic bubble, and they're not affected by it. And does the bubble pass through the front cars to where they can then again accelerate? Is that how you see it as a moving bubble? Yeah, the bubble travels backwards over the traffic. And then once it passes over you, you're allowed to accelerate again.

I believe you just coined a term, my friend. Traffic bubble. Like that jerk scientist. Or no, braking bubble. That's what I called it. Oh, OK. Braking bubble. Yeah, like a piping effect.

Yes. I hate that guy. And he hates you. I don't care. So traffic, Josh, you might as well throw in a few stats here. Yeah, this one's stat heavy. It is. This article by our colleague, Jonathan Strickland.

At Tech Stuff? Yeah, the baldest podcaster on staff here. What's a good stat here? The estimated traffic cost, if you want to talk about cost of traffic, in about five years ago, they estimated about $78 billion. And that's only fuel and waste of time. They don't take into account pollution,

environmental damage, health costs due to pollution. I mean, it would really add up if you got to include those things. Yeah, and with extra gas that was bought in 2007, right? Isn't that the year that study was conducted? Recovered? We in the US bought 2.9 billion, billion extra gallons of oil because of traffic. And the annual cost for each individual motorist in America

was like $710. Just sitting there? Just from traffic. Not from the gas that you need to actually get from point A to point B, but the extra gas used from idling. Yeah, crazy. Yeah. And I believe LA tops it out, obviously.

At about two weeks a year, you potentially spend sitting in your car in traffic. Yeah, LA has this group called the Texas Transportation Institute. And I think they're out of A&M, maybe? Yeah, Texas A&M. Can you tell? No, it's A&M.

OK. They're awesome. They are like the leaders in studying and understanding and trying to mitigate traffic, right? And they came up with this thing called the Travel Time Index, right? Yeah. So basically, you take the amount of time it takes,

and it's specific to each city. And it's for each city. It's not compared from city to city. It's compared to a certain time in one city to another time in the same city. So in an off-peak time, say you can travel the speed limit, it takes you one hour to get from point A to point B. In Los Angeles, it would take 1.92 hours.

Yeah, doubles your time, basically. Yeah, during rush hour. So it takes twice as long to get from point A to point B during rush hours compared to off-peak. That's the Travel Time Index. Yeah, and you have to do this anywhere you live where there's heavy traffic. When I lived in LA, I used to have to always think, all right,

well, this would take me 45 minutes normally. So when you work in the movie business, you can't be late. That's just not one of the things you do. Yeah, I would think so. You've got to be there on time or early. So you're like, well, it's supposed to take me 45 minutes. So I'm going to give myself two hours.

I gave myself more than double to get anywhere I needed to go. That's very smart. And it's awful is what it is. Yeah, LA's kind of bad. But Chuck, we have it pretty bad, too. Yeah, Atlanta's really bad. We're among probably, I think, the top three or four. I heard a year or so ago that Atlanta had toppled LA,

but I never saw any citation for it. Well, it depends on how they are rating it. They rate them differently, like the amount of time you spend in your car commuting or the amount of time you sit idling. So it kind of depends. But Atlanta's way up there. Boston, Seattle, San Francisco.

Yeah. Actually, I think Boston's absent from that. Oh, really? I think that they have made some moves that have kind of mitigated traffic and gotten them off some of the high up. I know the big dig was messing everything up. The big dig was just killing people.

Yeah, and DC is awful. Have you ever driven around there? No, I haven't. Umi was talking about how, especially during the summer, during the travel or the tourist season, it's just mind-numbing. It is. I mean, way out into the suburbs in Virginia and Maryland

sitting there. You know what they did in LA that I saw one time that I'd never seen was I was going down the highway one day, and I noticed everyone was slowing down. And I looked up ahead on the expressway, and there were two California Highway Patrol cars doing huge, slow Ss back and forth on the six lanes of expressway.

Not letting, like, keeping everyone back. Like a NASC, like a. Like a PACE car? Yeah, like a PACE car. But, you know, they weren't driving straight. They were driving these big Ss, like, don't go by me. I've never seen that before in my life. What would have made it even funnier

is if they'd been driving those Ss with their hands out the window and their guns just shooting into the air while they were doing it? That would really say don't drive past me, wouldn't it? Yeah, that would have been great. And apparently, that was they do that. It's a, I don't know what they call it, but that's to slow everyone down.

It's called being a f***ing s***. Yes. And on that note, my friend Derek has a joke about Atlanta traffic. And he's right, because Atlanta, before there's traffic, everyone's driving really, really what? Fast. Yeah, that's one of the great characteristics

about Atlanta, as far as I'm concerned. You go as fast as you can. I mean, the average flow of traffic, I would say, is about 70 miles an hour around here. And that's with, like, a lot of people all around you. Yeah, everybody's bumper to bumper going at least 70. And the cops don't pull you over unless you're going over 70. And even then, like, it's usually, like,

you're going 80 or 90 when you get pulled over, because everybody else is going 70. Right, and that's my buddy Derek's joke is in Atlanta, and it's really true, it's not a joke. Everyone drives as fast as they can every day until someone, then someone wrecks. Right. And then traffic backs up.

Right, exactly. Every single day. That's Atlanta traffic. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up

sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice

would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there

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Are we done? Let's just sit here and do traffic stories. Yeah, just talk about what angers us. So, Chuck, there's a lot of smart people who study traffic, because like you said, there's, what was it? How much money in $2,578 billion, just from fuel and wasted time? Yeah. Because think about it, a person's time is money,

and a person's time is money, and a person's time is money. And that's what I'm talking about. Fuel and wasted time, because think about it, a person's time is money, and if you're sitting in traffic, unless you're one of those jerks like me who has an iPhone that emails while he's driving, then you're wasting money. And actually, there's a group called the commute solutions that are out of Santa Cruz.

And they calculated the actual cost per mile of driving, not just traffic, but driving, to each person is $1.19 per mile. Really? Yeah. Wow. And that includes everything. I don't know how they came up with that number, but check it out.

Well, if we're talking about highways and stats, we might as well talk about the same Texas group did a study, and they found that traffic over the past 25 years has increased 131%, and by 2015, they predicted it will go up another 40%, and here's what's remarkable. 1.2%, only 1.2% of all our roads are highways, yet they shoulder half the traffic, half the car travel. Yeah.

Crazy. It is crazy, and you don't usually think about, when you think about traffic, I usually think about the highway myself, although I rarely get on the highway anymore. It's all surface streets that I take to and from work. Oh, really? Yeah.

What do you go, Jewett Hills? No, Piedmont. Oh, OK. I go basically up Piedmont Road. But it's traffic every day, but I don't think of it as traffic. When I think of traffic, I think of 75 at rush hour, and just exit ramps backed up. The thing is, our surface streets

are also intended to handle overflow of highway traffic, right? Not just people who are backed up from the exit ramp back onto the street, but I mean people who are making a conscious decision, like me, to find a different way that doesn't have anything to do with the highway, right? And they found that if you want to widen a highway,

I think we talked about this in the urban planning one, that when you widen a highway, there's something called latent demand. It's a theory that if you widen the highway, people like me are going to be like, oh, well, now there's 11 lanes instead of 5, so I'll just hop on the highway. And so the demand increases in step with the widening of the lanes, so it actually doesn't mitigate anything

by adding more lanes to a highway. Right, I think they said the only way that'll work is if they outpace demand with lanes, and that just doesn't happen. There's too many cars. No, it's too expensive. But that kind of makes sense to throw that money then instead into upfront costs for a light rail system.

Yeah. You hippy. Actually, I'm still holding out for personal rapid transit. Oh, right. That was a Palette and Me podcast, but it was interesting. It's a good one. New things.

Ramp metering, if you're talking about solutions, that's another one. And they had these in LA, and they have them here in Atlanta now. It's where when you go to get on the highway, now they have stop lights that just allow one car through every few seconds. So when you get on it Freedom Parkway,

I used to fly around that curve. Yeah, it was a fun curve. And jump into traffic. And squeeze in however I could. And I was one of those jerks causing traffic. Well, I think anybody entering is. Because again, with traffic, especially with just straight up congestion,

there's just too many cars in one place, especially when you have a line of traffic and then more people directly adding to that lane. Yeah. But ramp metering really, really works. They did a study in Minnesota. They have 430 ramp meters. And in 2000, they shut them all down for seven weeks.

And during that time, traffic accidents increased 26%. Then afterward, they reinstituted it. And they saw the capacity increase by 14%. And they walked away from that project going, whew whew whew whew whew whew whew whew whew whew whew. Like with their hands in their pockets. Oh. Yeah, like we should probably not tell anybody about that.

Yeah. I was trying to do a Minnesota accent. That was pretty good. I couldn't do it. All I said was, oh. I know. It wasn't bad, though. That's how they say it.

HOV lanes is another thing that they've done pretty much country-wide, carpool lanes. Those help. I always forget when I have another person in the car, though. Yeah. I'll get like halfway where I'm going and say, oh man, let's get in the carpool lane.

Yeah, I have to say, though, the HOV lane, to me, it's an extension of the fast lane. So you've got the fast lane, then you have the HOV lane. And I hate it when it's the fast lane is just the fast lane. The HOV lane is like, I drive as slow as I want, but I have four people in my car. Agreed. It makes it difficult.

It's kind of like the HOV lane, to me, is you have two or more people, and you're willing to drive 10 miles per hour faster than anybody else on the highway. Agreed. And since we talked about pet peeves in our last podcast, one of my largest pet peeves is when I'm sitting in traffic and I'll see people speeding by me in the HOV lane

by themselves. Nothing bothers me more than people that think the rules don't apply to them. I hate that, too. I hate those people. Or people who use the shoulder and just drive along in traffic as far as they can to get like 50 cars ahead. Yeah, I almost got plowed over in LA one time.

I was getting out to get in the regular exit lane, and I almost got creamed by a truck that was on the shoulder. And I screamed at him that he almost killed me, and he says, what are you, a cop? That's LA for you. I was like, he literally almost killed me. What are you, a cop? If you were a cop, you'd be making lazy Ss in front of traffic.

Firing my gun into the air. Exactly. What else, Josh? There's my mic. Adding lanes, we already talked about that, right? Yeah, there's that one. Then there's probably the most contentious idea, congestion pricing, which is basically taxing people to drive.

And there's a guy named Alistair Darling. I don't know if he's still the transportation secretary, but he's something of a rock star in the transportation world because he was a huge proponent of this, and he said. In England. In England, yeah. He was the British transportation secretary.

He basically said, cars exact a toll on the environment and on the road just by driving on them, so we should charge people to drive on the roads. What he failed to mention is that we already do. There are things called taxes, and those are meant to pay for the roads, right? He's forgetting about all the other misused money. But they did actually have one in Great Britain.

Do they still chuck? No, I don't think they ever instituted it. They had a pilot program from 2003 to 2007 in London. It's not anymore, for sure. And it worked like a champ for them in London, at least. Yeah, there was a 30% drop in congestion, 20% decrease in fossil fuel consumption, 20% decrease in CO2 emissions.

So like in London, Singapore, Stockholm. San Francisco. San Francisco, did they institute one? No, San Francisco is studying it. New York Bloomberg has proposed it, and they've studied it. And I just pulled this from this week, actually. Lord Adonis is actually, he's the transport secretary,

unless it's a new guy. What was your guy? His name is Lord Adonis. Yeah. Lord Adonis, the transport secretary. I just came up with a new hotel suit, and thank you, Chuck. Yeah, that's where Josh will be staying in New York under Lord Adonis.

Lord Adonis. It says it's ruled out the introduction of a national road pricing for the next parliament, but they uncovered that civil servants are still involved with the project and spending money on research. Even though they supposedly took it off the table, it was kind of a secret that they were still like tinkering with it.

Oh, gosh, I thought you were like saying these people were paying for this research out of their own paychecks. No, but they've sunk 7.2 million pounds that I guess the public didn't know. They thought it was off the table. So they're kind of under some hot water, in some hot water there. They're in some deep quicks, Ann.

Yeah, they said Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have been caught red-handed planning a spy in the sky system of a spy in the sky. Nice. Yeah, because I guess we should probably explain congestion pricing. Basically, every car on the road, I guess, when you would go get your vehicle tag or something,

you also get a radio frequency identifier, right? Right. And as you're driving, some satellite is tracking you, or you pass through some sector or something like that. And all of a sudden, you're in a toll area. And much like, say, one of those toll passes, you are sent a bill, or you have to set up a credit card or a bank account, attach that to your tag.

And it just draws money from it, based on however much you drive in there. In Singapore, when they first instituted, there's an actually in 1995, they had a flat rate for downtown, which is the most congested. During peak hours, you had to pay $3 to just drive around downtown. You could drive around all you wanted.

And as they've gotten better at it, they're getting a little fancy schmancy with it. Well, if you want to drive here, it's $1.75 for 20 minutes. But you can back two blocks over, and it's just $0.50, and so on. Well, that's one of the rubs that, one of the big things is in England, at least, in other places, too, I think they've

suggested paying more for peak hour. So be flexible in your work schedule. But then, of course, people that are a friend of the poor say, that's regressive taxation, because white-collar dudes can be all flexible and work from home, but the poor have to get up and go to work during peak hours. So they're basically paying for the road that the rich man drives on.

Exactly. That's exactly right. And that's the big problem, aside from having to pay to drive with a congestion tax. Yeah. What else can you do, Chuck? And also, remember, we're talking, this isn't just highways, surface streets, too.

Everybody, don't get all anxious. We're talking about surface streets, as well. Yes. Surface streets, you get a lot of suburban sprawl here in Atlanta. You've got, like, out in Roswell 20 years ago, it was pretty desolate, cow patties. And shrooms.

And now it's all young families moving out there who don't want to be around urban types. Yeah. And you have a lot more cars. You have, again, that one of two ways that you can cause traffic, just put more cars on a road than it's designed to handle. And out in the boonies like that,

they weren't built for, you know, they were built for farmland. All of a sudden, they got these suburban people moving out there. So yeah, traffic lights is something they can do. Yeah, this one disturbed me, that even the, so you have a traffic light that is on a timer, right? Yeah. Which is, I hate those things so much.

Decatur. Especially when they're poorly timed. Decatur is awful. Yes. Yeah, Decatur is awful. There's another one for the Piedmont Park parking deck. Oh, really? And it just does whatever it wants,

no matter what time of day. And if there's a car there or not, and people are just stopped in either direction, right? And that's a timed light, and time lights are awful. They're awful, right? Yes. And you have censored lights, which are awesome, right? Because you just come up in the way to your car triggers it.

Yeah, those are good. Yeah. Or you have a mixed system that uses timing and sensors. And it changes depending on the kind of day where it is. Like you can set up a city-wide comprehensive traffic light plan. Some cities have this. Yeah.

Even the best mixed city-wide comprehensive traffic light plan reduces congestion by 1%. Really? Yeah. Yeah, Atlanta's bad about that. At least in my area, there's, and Jerry can confirm this. She kind of lives over near me, but there's all these scenarios where you'll stop at a light that's

timed to not, part of the smart light system is that they're all timed to work together. So if you sit here at this corner and you take a right on red, there's not another red light waiting on you. And then that turns green. And then 30 more feet, there's another red light. They should be timed out to where they're green.

And LA, it's like, I mean, that's the one thing I will say. There's a lot of traffic. It's just because the people, they do the best they can. You look down, they have these long, long, long, straight streets in Hollywood. And late at night, you'll be sitting on Hollywood Boulevard at a red light. And you'll see, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank.

You'll see like eight lights turn green all in a row. That new balance commercial. With that woman running and she pushes herself to make all the lights. Doom to failure, but still, it was a nice effort. I would go longer in LA just to get off the highway, even if it took me longer just to feel like I was moving. And Chuck, I'm about to spoil it for all

of our British, UK, English, Welsh, Irish, Scottish friends who are typing an angry, corrective email about Alistair Darling. He is not the transportation secretary. He was the British secretary of state for trade and industry. Lord Adonis is the transport secretary. That is Ann May. Ann, your hotel name.

Ann is like the Joshua Winshawk. On the podcast, Paydude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when

questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen,

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Stuff you should know. We were talking about people studying this kind of thing. There's all sorts of really cool quantifications for traffic. My favorite is the passenger car equivalent. Let's hear it.

OK, so you have a passenger car is, say, a sedan, an average sedan, a Toyota Camry. OK. All right? Or, to be fair, a Honda Accord. Right. That is just an average car that you can fit four people in tune.

It drives down the road, and it's pretty responsive. Sure. An SUV, or a bus, or a van, is not as responsive. Because they're larger, and because they take up more space, they're slower to accelerate. And so they exact a heavier burden on a highway during congestion. OK.

Right? So what they've come up with are passenger car equivalents. So an SUV is 1.4 PCE. Sure. Right? And then a city bus is like 4.4 PCE. That means it's like four cars, right? Yeah, it has the same, as far as accelerating after breaking,

and just the space it's taking up, that's the equivalent of a passenger car. So one good solution to a traffic is everybody driving smaller cars. Yeah, no kidding. And virtual slots, right? Yeah, what's the deal there? Each car has a certain amount of space it takes up.

And don't try and fit into a slot that's smaller than your car. Is that how it works? Yeah, that's pretty much virtual slots. Like Tetris? Yeah, if you just imagine that there is basically a rectangle around your car. Like your bore bubble?

A bubble, but not a brake bubble. You want to avoid the brake bubble. But this is more of a rectangle, and it kind of hugs the sides of your cars, but it's longer on the front and back. And if everybody's car stays in these slots that are on the highway, you just kind of pull into them as you're driving. And the slots are going all the same rate,

then as long as there's not too many cars on the road, or more cars than there are slots, there should be no traffic. Yeah, but that never happens because all this is pie in the sky stuff. Well, yeah, because invariably, you're sitting in the lane, and you're like, oh, well, that lane's moving now, and then you get over in that lane. You're like, well, now that lane's moving,

and you keep going back and forth where if you stayed where you are, if everyone stayed where they were, you would all get there quicker. Or if everybody just stayed at home. Yeah, yes. Good point. Get your jobs, stay at home. Right, so that's our two cents.

And if you want to learn more about traffic, we've been killing the articles with cool flash animations, haven't we? Oh, did this have one? It has a flash animation about a traffic wave. Cool. No break bubble, though. I'm going to see about having somebody add one of those. Calling the term, my friend.

You can type in traffic. I think it'll bring up a bunch of stuff in the handy search bar howstuffworks.com, which means it's time for listener questions. It's time for Facebook questions. Yes, as we said in that other podcast on Quicksand, we posed on Facebook. Hey, give us some questions. We'll answer like 10 of them really quickly.

We got 180 of them in an hour. This comes from Chelsea. What's the most unusual thing you've ever eaten? Tripe, for me, which is intestines. Go ahead. What's yours? I've had fried chicken hearts. I've had beef tongue.

Yeah, I've had tongue. My favorite is bone marrow. Really? Highly, highly recommend. Anywhere you can find bone marrow, just eat it. The only place down here is Rathbuns, and it's OK. Yeah. Yeah, but you go to Rathbuns.

You've got to get one of those steaks. No, not Rathbun steaks, regular Rathbuns. Yeah, strangely, it doesn't have bone marrow there. But yes, those weird stuff. All right, what do you got? I got your questions right there. You want to read one? Yeah, I guess.

This one's from Jacob. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around here, and Jacob hyphenates no one, which, frankly, I find like, flairish, nice. Yes. Except for a tape recorder, which absorbs the radiant vibrations and can later play them back as audible waves, did the tree really make a sound?

The answer is yes. Hey. Yes. Kristen says, where are Kristen Candice now? And who does the intro for the podcast? Chris Pallette is co-host of Tech Stuff now, and has been for quite a while. He's made it.

Hometown Boy made good. Candice Gibson Keener has gotten married, and she stepped out of the limelight to concentrate on just being an editor. But she's still here, sits right next to Josh. And Roxanne does the intros for the podcast. She's our head of video. There you go.

That is not Jerry. A lot of people think it's Jerry. There's some comprehensive answers right there. Rachel says, she currently lives in Athens, GA. Go, dogs. I'd love to hear more about your experience living here, where you hung out, your favorite bands to see, what other fond or not so fond memories

you might have of Athens? She says, we have quite a following there. Did you know that? No. I didn't either. My bar was Roadhouse. I hung out at Roadhouse all the time. I was a Georgia bar guy.

Did you? Yes. And we should point out, though, that the Georgia bar, the globe, and the Roadhouse made up the Bar Muda Triangle. Yes. You could access them all through the alley to get to the next. Most decidedly could.

Quite often, you would hop around, depending on. I just stayed at Roadhouse. I hope Roadhouse is still there. It's got to be. Yeah, it is. And then, of course, I always liked Wilson's Soul Food and Guthrie's, which, in my opinion, is superior to Zaxby's, even though it's the same thing.

Yeah, I was automatic for the people. Were you? Yeah, I lived right around the corner from there. I can't remember. What was the name of that restaurant? I went to Weaver Dees, automatic for the people. Yes, that was good, too. I liked Wilson's because the owner walked around

and he was like four feet tall, and he shook hands with everybody. Right. Nice guy. And of course, Harry Bissets. I never went there. Oh my god. That was a frat bar.

You went there? I could go. It wasn't just the bar. Like, the food was amazing. Oh, was it? I put the food up against any in Atlanta. Eurowrap. Man, I ate a lot of euros in college.

Yeah, that's good. All right, Kristen. No, Randy. Who's the cat who won't cop out when there's danger all about? I think we both know. Shaft. Nice. Who's the cat that won't cop out?

That's one of the lesser quoted lines from that song. Yeah. I've got one from Siobhan. How do your significant others feel about your legion of man crushes and equally strong lady crushes? Chuck, I wasn't aware that anyone had a crush on us. Were you? I didn't know that.

No? I've seen them before, but Emily thinks it's funny. Does she? Sure. It is funny. She's know I'm not going anywhere. I mean, if only people could see our stomachs. So much hair and lint.

Laura, how many emails do you get per podcast? We get about 300 a week. Laura? Alan, who put the bop in the bop, shabop, shabop? The only reason I read that is because he's dressed as Milhouse in his picture. Nice. And who was your most surprising celebrity fan?

We've only got a few that we know of, and they're all surprising. Each one is more surprising than the last. I've got one. I can't remember her name. There's a girl who stars in Secret Life of the American teenager. Is she's a fan of the show?

She tweeted that she was on set like in between shooting and listening to stuff you should know. John Hodgman? I was pretty knocked out by that. That's pretty cool. Bradley Cooper? Yeah. Will Wheaton?

Yeah. Renee Zellweger? Aisha Tyler? Yes. And it's a couple of the Daily Show guys. Wyatt Sinek? Yeah. Joe Randazo, the editor and chief of the Onion.

Who else we got? If you are a celebrity that we did not mention, we would love to know that you listen to us because we're just kind of thrilling. We're like, we're nobody. So when we hear that, we think it's cool. Yeah. Yeah.

I got one more. Pirates of Shelly says pirates are ninjas. Ninjas, clearly. Definitely. That's it. OK. Chuck's given the, he's out? What is that called in Vegas?

Yeah, it's like when the dealer finishes their round or whatever. There's got to be a name for it. If you know the name for that, we want to know. Send it in an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more Howstuff Works? Check out our blogs on the HowstuffWorks.com homepage.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it.

And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart

radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.