Traffic Simulator
One thing that really annoys me is "elephant racing" where trucks battle to overtake at very small relative speeds (probably because they're both on their limiters but one has a slight calibration advantage). Especially on 2 lane roads where they block everyone while doing so.<p>Say a truck has a length of 16m, and starts the overtake 10m behind another one, and merges back in 10m in front. So that's an overtake distance of 36m. At 1mph relative speed, this takes 80 seconds.<p>Meanwhile, the cars behind the truck have all had to drop out of cruise and are now doing 10mph under their preferred speed (car speed limit is 70, lorries are 60). So that 80 seconds and 10mph under is 10 seconds of overall journey time. Not enormous, but it multiplies across all the cars in the queue, and across the number of lorries making this move in a journey.<p>However, the point is that if the overtaken lorry could just ease off the throttle by a single mph, he'd halve the overtake time, at a cost to himself of 1mph less for 40 seconds, which is less than a second of journey time.<p>So, when overtaken, a very minor "altruistic" gesture on the part of the shower lorry pays back dozens or hundreds of times over to other road users. And that's without considering the travelling waves that linger after dozens of cars slow down from a rolling roadblock and can make the whole road slower for everyone for a long time.