Simple Highway Simulator

Interesting project! I had fun playing with it. I wanted to test the theory (which I saw in an article posted here on HN a few weeks ago) that a single car slowing right down on…

Some bugs (cars not always breaking when another is standing still ahead; cars crashing at the beginning if you hit launch too quickly), but overall a fun toy to play with. I…

Here's something fun and counter-intuitive: From default settings, set speed variance to 50%, launch frequency to 120 cars/minute, and reaction time to 500ms. Unsurprisingly,…

Its principles also hold up for drivers in China. Guess the chinese love copying american things right down to driving just as badly :-D Anyway, jokes aside, this has a lot more…

Really cool project. I wonder if transportation agencies would want to use something like this for studying traffic.

Simple Highway Collision Simulator. Could be a great little game with an educational bent. Personally I set reaction time to 0 and jacked everything else to max. Then I spammed…

The 200ms default reaction time in the simulation is wildly optimistic. I remember 1500ms from rider training and http://www.visualexpert.com/Resources/reactiontime.html seems to…

Some bugs (cars not always breaking when another is standing still ahead; cars crashing at the beginning if you hit launch too quickly), but overall a fun toy to play with. I…

also braking: it looks like the cars can only brake as fast as they accelerate. seems like this should be a different slider.

Lots of cars do 15 km/h/s (that's a 0-60 mph time of ~6 seconds). A basic Honda Civic will be around 9 or 10 seconds, which is roughly 10 km/h/s. 5 km/h/s would feel pretty…

Some bugs (cars not always breaking when another is standing still ahead; cars crashing at the beginning if you hit launch too quickly), but overall a fun toy to play with. I…

If you launch new cars too quickly, they start blowing up. :)

This might depend on your screen size, on my screen the crashes occur on the right edge of the road.

What I'm missing is right lane preference, that would control how much people obey the rule that you shouldn't be on the leftmost lane unless you are faster then the cars in the…

Or indeed left-lane preference, for British and Japanese users. But yes a more sophisticated simulation would use > 2 lanes, and have various controls for lane discipline,…

It'd be interesting to implement lane discipline and see how one bad driver effects the rest.

Yes, please! I suspect lack of lane discipline to be the single biggest disadvantage US freeways have to American's. I would love to test that at least via simulation. I would…

Something this sim doesn't model that plays a large role in real accidents is the speed differentials during merges. If an offramp moves too slowly and gets fully congested, it…

Or indeed left-lane preference, for British and Japanese users. But yes a more sophisticated simulation would use > 2 lanes, and have various controls for lane discipline,…

Nice. I've wanted to do something like this, as I have a theory about the car pool lanes being worse for traffic. When traffic is bad, car pool lanes are just as backed up…

Some bugs (cars not always breaking when another is standing still ahead; cars crashing at the beginning if you hit launch too quickly), but overall a fun toy to play with. I…

Lots of cars do 15 km/h/s (that's a 0-60 mph time of ~6 seconds). A basic Honda Civic will be around 9 or 10 seconds, which is roughly 10 km/h/s. 5 km/h/s would feel pretty…

Glad to see my first post on HN to receive such positive feedback. I guess I'll post my vacation projects regularly if they are appreciated :-) If you want to see a more…

No post on traffic is complete without a reference to the original "traffic hobbyist": http://trafficwaves.org/ from Jan 1998.