Repeated action causes the waves to grow. Ironic that the angry people who drive as fast as possible are unwittingly participating in 'amplifying' the very waves that they hate so much. More experiments I rarely commute on 520 where the good traffic waves appear. I started to miss having opportunities to cancel them. However, I soon realised that the same process could be used to affect small traffic jams too.
Traffic waves are simply a series of small traffic jams with even spacing.
Each little jam is destroyed when a large empty space approaches it from behind. If no new cars are feeding into the jam from behind, yet cars are leaving its front, then the jam is eroding away. Just one single car, if it decelerates while approaching, can bite a massive chunk out of stopped traffic' Now I remember something from years farther back. When leaving one of those 'rubbernecker slowdowns', I always tried to accelerate like mad. I figured that if everyone did this, then the slowdown would evaporate.