re: A reminder that zipper merging is how your supposed to handle merging

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We approach the right lane closure, I am in the left, and have been for some time and I’m supposed to just let the people over who purposefully ignored the sign. frick all that.

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Yes

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Listen, if a two lane highway is going from two lanes down to one, a slowdown is going to happen regardless because some vehicles will slow below the speed limit. But if everyone merges well before the lane closure, there should be minimal slowing. Throw in a couple of cars waiting until the end to merge, and you have people in the open lane having to slow to let them in. It just happens, people aren’t great drivers.

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At any given speed, there is a safe following distance. If two lanes are filled with cars and all are following the prescribed safe distance, then no matter where the merge takes place the drivers will have to slow down to maintain that safe distance when the lanes are merged. Merging early or late will not affect this.

Your argument that early merging avoids slowdowns only works for sparse traffic with cars spaced apart greater than the minimum required safe distance. Once traffic density is high enough, a slow down is inevitable and zipper merging is more efficient and leads to order and reduced conflict as everyone should know where and when to expect the merge to occur.

I just take the open lane then get in when I get to front. Sometimes there is a dick trying to keep me from my rightful place in the que.

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My pet peeve lately is that it seems everyone forgot how to turn off their brights. Flash them and they still just leave them on like a jackass.

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People flash me all the time when my dim lights are actually on. Manufacturers make headlights too bright and my truck is all stock no aftermarket bulbs or leveling kit that could make it worse

frick the line jumpers. Get in line and wait your turn heathen. Your time is not more valuable than mine.

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Exactly. It’s common fricking sense.

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You’re a fricking idiot. A selfish, narcissistic idiot.

Your solution of “I merge when I want and at that point, I’m not letting anyone else merge in front of me because my random selection of a merge point is the now official merge point” is the exact reason we have massive backups at merge points.

If you want move into the open lane two miles before the merge point, fine. But keep plenty of open space between you and the car in front so us competent drivers can merge over without a significant reduction in speed.

So dumb.

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It’s not skipping the line, it’s using all available lane space.

Dumb Frick.

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It is, if there is bumper to bumper traffic

Go look at the gwrman recommended km per hour when they developed this technique

You dumb frick

I merge when it's most convenient to do so. People that zipper merge usually race ahead til the last second and then daringly shoot the gap in such a way that causes someone to hit the brakes to avoid rear-ending them.

That's what causes slow downs in traffic. It's not the "early mergers" that are the problem. It's people that don't anticipate and bring traffic to a crawl by causing others to have to tap the brakes to avoid a collision which causes a rubber-band effect.

Edit: There's, "Using all available lane space," and driving like an a-hole. You know the ones. People should be considerate drivers, but that goes both ways. Letting people merge, but also not weaving in and out of lanes like it's a NASCAR race.

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What "everyone in one lane" adopters fail to realize is that at some point, everyone MUST move from the right lane to the left lane and by doing it willy-nilly, you create more conflict points. It's better to have it at one single point and use the full road storage up until that point.

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No, no, no. A single conflict point is bad, and using the "full road storage" is bad.

If there is one conflict point where everyone merges, if it's going to be efficient then it has to work like clockwork. Everyone has to be on point and accelerate precisely right. This does not and will never happen, and trying to do this *causes* the "full road storage" situation. It creates a humongous conflict point, and every vehicle has to slow to a crawl or stop.

Merging early allows most vehicles to merge with no conflict at all. Just merge when you can. It's less of a bottleneck and more of a long funnel. And by the time the vehicles reach the choke point they are moving faster and keep things moving.

I don't know how these supposed studies and models were done which claim to prove zipper merge is best, but if one of the objectives is to treat the road as vehicle "storage" then it is flawed from the start. Roads are for moving cars, not storing them. Keeping cars moving requires speed, not precision merging.


Think about it like this, starting with 2 lanes jam packed at a dead stop for a mile. To simplify, the one open lane ahead is wide open, and there are no new vehicles adding to the back of the lines. What's the fastest way to clear this jam? Not the zipper merge, and not by a long shot. The fastest way is to tell everyone in the open lane to go as fast as they safely can go, then once that lane is empty tell the blocked lane to go ahead and move over and go as well. We can make it faster if those in the rear of the blocked lane start moving over and going as soon as they can instead of going in the present order. This would clear the jam much, much faster than a zipper merge. Why? Because we eliminated the damned choke point and pretended it was a 1 lane highway. The zipper merge not only maintains the choke point, but it forces every single fricking vehicle to deal with it at slow speed.

Now, of course things change if the single lane ahead is backed up, and we also have to consider what is happening behind the jam as well. But if we want raw efficiency at moving vehicles, we need more cars per second through the choke point and that requires speed. Zipper merge is far from ideal.

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So I think you give WAY too much credit to people going breakneck like it's turn 4 at talledega until the very last possible millisecond before forcing their way into the left where all of us have been for a while since we saw the sign that said "LANE CLOSED AHEAD, MERGE LEFT"

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Every. Single. Day.