When you’re caught in a traffic jam, you feel powerless. What you may not know is that you can actually have a big effect on the traffic around you.

There is a growing body of research finding that an individual driver, by preventing bottlenecks and maintaining a steady speed, can sometimes single-handedly ease or break up a traffic jam.

The techniques are simple, though some of them—such as leaving a large gap between your car and the one in front and freely letting other drivers cut in—feel counterintuitive to most drivers.

Seattle engineer William Beaty, a leading proponent of jam-busting techniques for individual drivers, illustrated some of them on a ride through rush-hour traffic.

Mike Sudal/The Wall Street Journal

Commuters in Seattle spend an average 66 hours a year stuck in traffic, making it one of 10 U.S. cities with the worst traffic, according to INRIX, a transportation analytics company. Traffic congestion is getting worse in many cities, even as desperate drivers take more active steps to avoid it with apps such as Waze and Google Maps.

As Mr. Beaty merges onto a crowded stretch of Seattle’s I-5, he drives at a steady speed, keeping a space of several car lengths in front of him. “As merging cars come in, I don’t have to slow down, which means that nobody behind me has to slow down,” he says. As he nears an exit, two drivers on his left merge smoothly into the lane in front of him and exit without hitting the brakes.

Meanwhile, the car behind him is just a few feet away. “That’s the tailgating philosophy,” he says. “You push ahead, and you think if everybody would just push ahead, then everyone would go faster,” he says. In fact, “it just turns the road into a parking lot.”

As Mr. Beaty approaches a left-hand exit into downtown Seattle, the center lane is backed up as a few cars struggle to cross over to the exit. “This jam is created by just a few drivers’ getting trapped,” he says. “This is one of the places where an individual driver can wipe out a gigantic jam” by allowing cars to accelerate freely into your lane, he says.

Mr. Beaty, a 58-year-old electrical engineer, has honed his techniques by trial and error, testing various maneuvers on his commute. But researchers at three Chinese universities tested Mr. Beaty’s methods, which they labeled “jam-absorption driving,” and found they can prevent waves of congestion from forming in moving traffic, according to a study published in August. A separate study published last year by Japanese researchers also found Mr. Beaty’s techniques could prevent jams under some conditions.

Mr. Beaty’s recommendations, which he has posted on a website, trafficwaves.org, have been cited in five peer-reviewed academic studies. Seattle residents who have seen his YouTube videos frequently stop him in the street and ask, “Aren’t you the traffic-wave guy?”

Conducting experiments in physics, holography, biology and other fields is a favorite pastime for Mr. Beaty. A former science-exhibit designer who has built robotic dinosaurs and earthquake simulators for museums, he has created his own lab, a rented space filled with half-assembled gadgets, near his home in the funky Georgetown area of Seattle. Mr. Beaty says he has gotten as many as 410,000 hits a week on his main website, Science Hobbyist. His work is a popular source of project ideas among physics students and teachers, says Dan MacIsaac, an associate professor of physics at Buffalo State College, part of the State University of New York.

Mr. Beaty stresses that his observations about traffic aren’t new. “These are things that traffic experts and long-haul truckers have known forever,” he says. Formerly afflicted with road rage himself, he began experimenting with jam-busting techniques years ago, during his 40-minute commute to his job as an engineer on the support staff at the University of Washington’s chemistry department. (His traffic research is unrelated to his day job.) He noticed that traffic congestion forms in waves, like sand or water, and the smallest obstruction, such as one driver swerving or slowing briefly, could trigger a chain reaction of drivers hitting the brakes.

By trying various maneuvers, he found he could sometimes have the opposite effect, allowing backups to drain away. “I saw the jams evaporate,” he says.

His techniques won’t work if you’re already locked in bumper-to-bumper traffic and can’t find anywhere to open a gap, Mr. Beaty says. Also, some congestion is irreducible, when the volume of traffic exceeds the capacity of the road.

It takes a while for his techniques to feel natural, Mr. Beaty acknowledges, and some drivers never see the point. He has been flamed on YouTube and his own website by drivers who insist his techniques are wrong. On the highway, aggressive drivers sometimes race around him and fill the spaces he creates. “Your gut tells you you’re supposed to push ahead,” he says.

Some scientists say Mr. Beaty’s observations are too imprecise to be useful. When a driver tries to maintain a gap between his car and the one ahead, “there’s no way to predict exactly what will happen in the next minute, so you don’t know how much space you need,” says Martin Treiber, chair of the traffic-modeling, econometrics and statistics department at Germany’s Dresden University of Technology and a developer of traffic-flow models illustrating causes and solutions for congestion.

Experts agree, however, that lane-weavers—who force others to slam on the brakes—rubberneckers who pause to gawk at roadside distractions and tailgaters can single-handedly back up traffic for miles. “These are some of the really stupid reasons for traffic being bad,” says Steven Shladover, a manager at the Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology program at the University of California, Berkeley.

William Beaty. Photo: Margaret Bartley

As traffic congestion gets worse, some government regulators are embracing traffic-control tools based on the same principles as Mr. Beaty’s techniques. On-ramp stop-and-go lights on some state highways force drivers to leave spaces in front of their cars, for example, and “zipper-merge” rules require drivers in construction zones to open gaps in front of their cars so others can take turns merging smoothly.

Like many traffic experts, Dr. Shladover uses some of Mr. Beaty’s techniques intuitively to smooth traffic flow, but he’s skeptical that many other drivers could be persuaded to do the same. “Selfishness takes hold, and people don’t necessarily think much about the common good,” he says.

Eventually, if large numbers of self-driving cars equipped to maintain uniform speeds and distances between cars take the road, he says, “hopefully most of that nonsense will go away.”

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Driver-education schools try to train students to stop tailgating, leave wide gaps between cars and take turns when merging, but “people have to unlearn what they’ve been taught” about standing in line, says Dave Muma, president of the Driving School Association of the Americas, a trade group. “Kids are trained at a very young age that they have to get in line and not let people cut in front of you”—rules that work well on the playground but cause gridlock on the highway, says Mr. Muma, owner of a Holland, Mich., driver-education company.

Mr. Beaty says seeing oneself as a jam-buster has its own rewards. “You’re above it all,” he says. “If you maintain big empty spaces, all these options open up, and you’re actually the superior driver,” free to “be the person who holds the door open for others.”

Write to Sue Shellenbarger at sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com