The blog is very useful.

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Philip is right about BART-to-bus from our house in Berkeley to Golden Gate park on Sundays. It can take two hours. It’s the bus part that slows you down.

And yes, Philip, on the hybrid, you can leave the air-conditioning on, but Joel doesn’t like it set that way.

And while you might be able to have a fuel efficient car by simply sacrificing acceleration, I doubt such a car would sell. Electric cars (aka golf carts) are efficient, but practically no one want them. Consumers want a car that satisfies all their transportation needs, from stop-and-go traffic to cruising at 80 mph. The hybrid allows this while still getting extremely good gas mileage.

You picked a uniquely inopportune time to be driving into SF – right before a big Giants game on a weekend.

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/preview?gid=230810126
For what it’s worth, about a month ago I was back in the south bay (Milpitas/Sunnyvale/Mountain View) for a week after having moved out of the area about a year ago. Traffic seemed a little lighter than as I had remembered it, probably due to ongoing layoffs and (to a lesser extent) people moving out. The consensus among people in the office is that commute times are faster than they were a couple years ago. Certainly nothing like this bumper to bumper stuff, but maybe that’s because where I work (Cisco) people have the sense to come in a little later (a bit after 9AM on average) and leave a little later (maybe 6PM or later). In a week of driving around I didn’t get stuck in any slow traffic.

“Also the entire ventilation system shuts down if the engine shuts down at a traffic light.”
Only if you keep the car in “ECON” mode. There is an on/off button for this (marked ECON) on the dash, just below the AC controls. Sometimes it helps to read the manual.

Phil-

I recommend http://www.transitinfo.org’s TakeTransit planner. Pick where you want to go and when and it’ll give you a customized itinerary. Invaluable for my Bay Area non-car trips

Hope it works.

BTW, if you research traffic-related stuff, I’m interested…e-mail me

Phil, everyone knows the traffic in the Bay Area is horrid and that the only way to trully fix it is for people to radically change their habits and preferences. That is not going to happen any time soon.

What about WiFi around there… you’d think with the density of hi-tech firms and rich people and interest in the Internet that you could fry an egg with all the WiFi in the air. Just curious.

Hmm. So, to compensate for the phenomenon Stan mentioned, cars would need to apply a form of forward error correction, and communicate among themselves.

Even if only some cars in a column were network aware and could share info (the lead car acting as a ‘master’), you would shave off a cumulative half second for every pair of cars that were directly in series, so they could move in unison.

This is a naively pessimistic solution though. Better results could be obtained (for each individual car) if the half-second reaction time can be *reduced* as well, even if the car immediately ahead was an old fashioned ’stupid’ model, or is being driven manually. Driving in stop-and-go traffic is exactly the sort of mind-bogglingly boring task that many people would rather a computer did anyway, so let a computer take charge of matching the car’s movement to the one in front of it by using lidar or something similar. It’s not a ‘boil the ocean’ plan, each driver with this feature realizes an immediate personal benefit, and so does everyone behind them.

Studies have been done on this “wave” phenomena – the problem is the addition of reaction time to each car in a line of traffic. Suppose someone cust you off in the high speed lane. It takes you a half second to react, and although in this example you only have to slow slightly to let the person into the lane safely, a half second has been “used.” The person behind you, however, needs a half second to react to your slowing down – now the cumulative time is a second – and so he/she has to slow a little bit more than you to maintain a safe distance. Go twelve cars back and you’re talking seven seconds – at this point the person has to come to a complete stop to avoid hitting the car ahead. And the reverse is true when this person starts off from the stop – it takes seven seconds for the fourteenth car back to respond to the first car “stopped” and begin moving.

Sorry, I have no idea where I got his information several years ago.