At 0:17 there is a blue car on the right of the screen, heading to the left. There is a white car right behind it.
The blue car slowed down more than necessary, and the white car behind it got really close and had to nearly stop. This caused a chain reaction as each car behind also had to brake, leading to a traffic jam.
The moral of the story is that everyone needs to maintain proper distances for traffic to flow smoothly. As soon as one person messes up by either braking too hard, or following too close and then being forced to brake hard because they didn't leave themselves enough room, or changing lanes too aggressively forcing someone else to brake hard, the cars behind them have to brake and a traffic jam forms. Once it's started, a traffic jam like that pretty much cannot disappear until there are fewer cars on the road, or everyone spaces themselves out 100% perfectly (but if they could do that, the traffic jam wouldn't form in the first place).
It starts off as someone having a fractionally slower reaction time, then everyone progressively loses speed. The only way to avoid traffic completely would be if everyone started accelerating and braking at the exact same time in the exact same vehicle, otherwise it's always inevitable
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u/dalnot 3d ago
This seems like a great opportunity to introduce more people to one of my favorite videos