OT: The beauty of zipper merging, or why you should drive ruder
jch_212b05a497
Posts: 13
According to Ars Technica, people should drive all the way up to the closed lane and then merge.
The beauty of zipper merging, or why you should drive ruder
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I'd just like people to not be so furious about the entire fact of traffic merging in NORMAL circumstances. Where I live, an on-ramp often continues right into an exit lane; so you have to merge over immediately from the right to avoid being forced off the highway as soon as you're on it. Unfortunately people take it as a personal insult when you try to change lanes to your left to avoid undesired exiting, and everyone has learned not to signal until a split second before merging because otherwise they will speed up and prevent you.
I've noticed a difference in the definition of "cutting off" depending on which part of this divide a person is, too. The people who hate to let anyone merge refer to people from the right lane "cutting me off and slowing me down," whereas people who want to merge from the right refer to the person in the left lane "speeding up and cutting me off."
I used to work at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. I would drive 40 miles up the long skinny island along the Atlantic coast between the two "rivers" (the "Indian River" and the "Banana River") between Melbourne and the Space Center. This was almost 40 years ago so the roads were mostly two lane. The drive up Florida Route 3 to work in the morning was 35 miles up two-lane road then as you got onto the Space Center it widened into 4-lanes.
However, going home at night you had thousands of people leaving at the same time on one of only three roads (West, East, & South) leaving the Space Center (which covered over 200 square miles of swamp with dozens of major buildings and facilities). The road going south was Florida State Rd. 3 and was 4-lanes till just before you left the Space Center perimeter, then it squeezed down to 2-lanes. But since the Space Center was limited access and there was nothing else along the road for a couple miles on either side of the perimeter fence, everybody leaving in the rush knew the ad-hoc rules... As you approached the merge the two southbound lanes both filled up and left a car length or two between each car and at the merge we "zipped" together at 60 miles an hour. It was a beautiful dance!
Sounds like I-45 in Texas near NASA. It use to take me 2.5 hours to drive home where driving to work was 1 hour.
Do that in NYS in a construction zone and the State Troopers will hit you with a wad of traffic citations. Most with doubled fines because they took place in a construction zone.
It's actually amazing that there aren't more accidents. Put 100 million tired, selfish, hurried, semi-intelligent, distracted monkeys into 1-ton un-automated powered battering rams and squeeze them onto inadequate and poorly maintained narrow pathways, and we should be solving the population problem every evening! But somehow it doesn't happen. 8-s
You can be such a ray of sunshine on a gloomy evening...that's why we love you.
You can be such a ray of sunshine on a gloomy evening...that's why we love you.
And yet so truthful! :-)
Zipper merging... huh... that's a generous term... I have one of my own, but its probably against TOS profanity rules...
Wanna bet whomever came to this conclusion, either did so via an algorithm or some probability formula ... I'd also suspect they probably have never actually gone outside and see actual humans driving cars.
Computer simulations are not very accurate in relation to the vastly dynamic and adaptable modes of human stupidity... no amount of variables that you could throw in would compare to what one dimwit could output in a quarter mile.
The first and foremost mistake this study makes is that most people reading it will posses even the most basic level of rational judgement... The second glaring mistake is they posses reasonable ability to control a vehicle and posse adequate driving skills...
The third is they would be looking where they are going...
Fourth that they are not eating pizza, shaving, texting and putting on lipstick while trying to do this...
Zipper merging is like a formal admission of giving up on civilization or tantamount to giving a monkey a box of hand grenades and saying "Have at it lad!".
On paper it does not seem like a bad idea... then again neither does merging when one sees the signs... what either takes to actually work is cooperation and civility....
Which is kinda like why most good ideas don't work on this planet.
All this does is encourage bad drivers to drive worse and apply the "me first" method to everything else... so what you'll end up seeing is fools fighting to get into the lane that is ending, just so they can speed ahead of everyone else, and then getting frustrated because they can't do it fluidly and so they just cut everyone else off (usually two or three at a time), resulting in more (worse) stop and go traffic...
Maybe Minnesota is different than the rest of the world... definitely different from New York, where I live, so maybe it'll work there.
Driving is a privilege not a right and it requires skill and competence.
Yet most people treat driving with zero respect and are surprised when the odds catch up to them.
Better and more rigid driver education and testing... mandatory retesting (road tests, not quizzing) for repeat violators or certain offenses, and monetary fines in relation to ones income are just a few of the steps to be taken to encourage better driving.
But in reality, few politicians would have the guts to front these concepts here... they hardly can enact stiffer penalties for DWI, let alone getting people to drive better... so we end up with pea brained ideas like encouraging zipper merging.
Yeah... thanks Minnesota.
You can be such a ray of sunshine on a gloomy evening...that's why we love you.
I'm an old fart. The light you see shining forth from me is burning fart gas.
Lordvicore, entertaining as usual:
"All this does is encourage bad drivers to drive worse and apply the “me first” method to everything else… so what you’ll end up seeing is fools fighting to get into the lane that is ending, just so they can speed ahead of everyone else, and then getting frustrated because they can’t do it fluidly and so they just cut everyone else off (usually two or three at a time), resulting in more (worse) stop and go traffic… "
You've just described Boston in one sentence. :lol: I've seen drivers on the highway dive into the exit lane, race ahead, then cut back in. Turn signals are considered a sign of weakness. Either that, or the turn signal is a statement, not a request (I am merging NOW!).
Here's another one that would drive people in the US right over the edge of road rage insanity: Lane splitting. On a visit to another country (which shall remain nameless), I observed the quite civil and efficient technique of lane splitting. On a highway with 2 lanes in each direction, you would have cars 3 abreast. 3 lanes? 5 cars! The car on the far right (driving on the right) would pull over half a lane, the car on the far left would pull out half a lane, and there you go, 3 cars side by side in two lanes, each going as fast as they could. This depended on having divided roads with shoulders on both sides. On undivided roads, it is kind of like normal passing, except that the car on the far left does not pull all the way over into opposing traffic. This was usually caused by the ratty, underpowered car on the far right being passed by a slightly faster, slightly less ratty car in the middle, with a tour bus full of tourists (me) passing them all on the left. It would never work here.
Two more comments: I firmly believe that people who spend multiple hours each day on their commute get their brains so fogged and numb that if, by some miracle, they are presented with an unobstructed roadway at that time of day, they persist in plodding along at bumper to bumper speeds because cognitive dissonance tells their brains it can't be real. Or to put it another way, a quote from the junkyard philosopher in 'Repo Man', "The more you drive, the less intelligent you are."
On a race track, certain things are expected of you, and there are certain things you expect of your competitors. It is expected that if you come up on a slower car that you will pass that car without causing an incident. It is expected that if a faster car catches up to you that you will let him (or her) figure it out and not make an issue of it by deliberately blocking. Blocking can either get you black flagged, or cause an accident, both of which are undesirable. Other than that, as long as you follow the instructions of the people waving the flags and you don't go completely off course or hit something, it's all good. The problem with driving on the public roads is, NOBODY KNOWS what is expected of them and nobody knows what to expect from the other drivers. At least on the race track, everyone knows what to expect. On the race track, everyone can be expected to have considerably more training and talent than the minimum required to drive on the public roads.
It really is different in different places.
I lived in one city where people would almost never let you in. If you put on your blinker, made eye contact with the driver behind you, and waited for somebody to let you merge, you would likely be sitting there until rush hour ended. You had no choice but to simply jam your car into a randomly-selected space that was physically big enough for your car to fit in with a few feet of error margin, ignoring any sort of safe stopping distance buffer. After a few years I decided it seemed to help to pretend you couldn't see the person behind you (while actually watching them so you didn't him them, obviously). Although I never did it, I considered ideas like putting a "student driver" sticker or those spiked hubcaps on the car to see if that might get people to leave more space purely out of a sense of self-preservation for their own car and insurance premiums. Sad that something as basic and painfully simple as a merge can't be handled and is turning us all into Mad-Max-like drivers.
I now live in a different city where people usually DO let you in. It's really a very welcome change. Of course, some of them regularly drive 40 in a 55 zone for no apparent reason, but at least they can handle merges.
I often wish I could see into the minds of other drivers just to know why they do the things they do. For example, you are on a 55mph highway that's curvy enough you can't pass but but not so much you have to slow down. You can't pass for 15 minutes, and somebody is going 50mph so there are a dozen cars backed up behind them. Then a passing lane appears for a mile, and everybody including the slowest person speeds WAY up probably to 70mph or something leaving you a good mile behind traffic, then the very second the passing lane ends, only a lucky few who were going 80 made it past, and everybody else slows back down to 50mph and you're stuck behind everybody again within minutes. Very strange.
Greetings,
You, of course, are a beacon of sanity and brilliant driving, in a morass of untrained maniacs and idiots.
Yup.
Here's the thing. If people work together on the roads, everybody gets where they're going faster. Period. That means you have to have respect, and trust, in the people around you even if you think they're probably assholes. Fundamentally, you MUST work with the people around you, and sometimes shock that means going slower than you actually want to. In the end, it works out for the better.
My favorite page, bar none, on this is here: http://trafficwaves.org/trafexp.html
I read this over a decade ago, and it has fundamentally changed the way I drive. When traffic is moving at a good clip, I don't care...I'm just a happy clam, zipping along in a ton of steel and fiberglass. When traffic is very slow, I flip a bit in my mind, and ACTIVELY work to combat the traffic. Not for myself, because (and this is key!) you cannot fix traffic for yourself. But you can fix traffic for thousands of people behind you. When that bit is set, the #1 thing I do is preserve a LONG blank space ahead of me by reducing my speed just a hair from the person ahead of me, and let it build up.
Cars change lanes into it? No worries! 75% (made up number, it's a big percentage!) of the time a person changing lanes will change lanes again within the next 5 minutes; it's like they have a 'lane changer' bit set on them. Also them pulling into the dead space ahead of me (and usually zipping to the front of it), reduces congestion in the lane they're pulling in from. It's all good.
The number one thing that this ends up doing, is it means that I almost never actually stop, in stop-and-go traffic. Because by the time I catch up to the stopped car ahead of me, they've started moving again. That means that the thousands of people behind me, will not have to stop at that point either. That's kind of awesome.
This shit works! If nothing else, it gives you the awareness of control, and when you're in traffic, and frustrated because it seems meaningless, that feeling of control is the biggest stress reliever you'll ever find.
Anyway, that's my random rant for the day. Seriously, read that web page. It's really, really smart, and yes, it even works with drivers in your state. ;)
-- Morgan
I don't know why we're so surprised about bad driving etiquette. You ever watched people on escalators, or slidewalks (like in the airport), or down narrow sidewalks or hallways or stairs? Rules of the road apply there too. i.e. slow lane is on the right (in the US), yet a pair of bubble headed boobies will invariably form a blockade while they ignore everything around them except the gizmo in their hand. Then when they get off the escalator family groups will stop and form a circle to determine if everybody in the group made the trip down the escalator OK. Same thing with doors. Groups will stop just outside the door and form a pow-wow. I wish I had the balls to carry a compressed gas blast horn and use it.
And I'm sorry to say it but I find some of the biggest offenders are the geriatric set. It's like the trip through the door was exhausting and they need to stop and gather in a group to hold themselves up.
I've learned to deal with these issues by visualizing the crowd around me as escapees from some simian zoo and expecting them to behave as such. That way I'm rarely surprised, and I find it easier to forgive them.
I agree with the "leave a long space between you and the car ahead" philosophy. Tailgating/lanechanging accomplishes very very little. I snicker every time I watch a tailgater/lanechanger work his way up the line then a few minutes later I pull in next to him at the red light.
When I lived in Washington DC I used to travel Constitution Avenue a lot, from one end to the other. It's a long straight, very busy, center city, six lane avenue with lots of cross streets but the stop lights are timed. You may get caught by a light at the beginning of your trip but if you settle down and drive the 30mph speed limit you'll get out of town as fast or faster than the jackass swerving in and out of traffic zipping to the next stop light too early.
@Lypherfox, I think you hit the nail on the head with that quote. I'm guilty of thinking it.
@LeatherGryphon, I'm going to have to start keeping an eye out for escalator habits now. But you have to admit, escalators ARE tricky and hard, and can pose quite a dangerous challenge. It's amazing anybody makes a trip unscathed. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nQl8Fqp7TI :-)
While I am often frustrated by weird traffic behavior, I have to admit the humor factor can be pretty high. (I know, I'm a horrible person, but I can't help but laugh sometimes.) For example, several of us took a freeway exit ramp and lined up at the yield sign waiting for traffic to clear on the road we were turning onto. Traffic cleared, and the 2nd car in line took off.
...uh... but he was the SECOND car in line. Not the first car, which was still there 3 feet in front of him. The second car therefore made it about 3 feet. I feel really bad for the first guy in line and everybody's wallets, but it was still dang funny to watch.
I totally agree - it feels like russian roulette sometimes...