More likely, wayyyy at the head is the chokepoint in the infrastructure that is making everyone try to get over at the same time and causing a build up of traffic behind them.
Yes, sometimes it is idiotic drivers, but I find more often than not it is the engineers or the limits of the area the road is built in that add chokepoints that fuck everything over.
“Oh. Everyone wants to take this exit? Make it a short one lane into a red light. That won’t fuck over the highway”
It’s amazing how much a little natural geography can completely fuck up traffic. There’s a spot in Denver where I-25 shifts slightly, maybe 5 degrees. But I’ll be damned if that tiny little change in direction isn’t enough to make someone going the speed limit tap their brakes just for a second. Rippled over thousands of cars during rush hour, it creates a bottle neck almost every single day at that exact spot. I’m sure planning an interstate is a nightmare of a task, just knowing that even the slightest deviation from absolutely straight is going to fuck everything up for decades.
