Do they even have paved roads, up in Canada, hey dere?
For me, it’s a question of courtesy. Is it your imagination that the rest of us don’t see the open lane? No, we see it and we all hope you get a gun shot to the tire for rushing up to the bottleneck and trying to merge in ahead of us.
Your time isn’t more important than mine. We’re all waiting for a reason.
This is part of the reason I started cycling to work. People drive like self-centered jerks. RAGE
Why would you think dog sled traffic behaves any differently from cars?
The counter to this is that you simply didn’t take the obvious advantage someone else did.
That’s not to say I don’t agree with you, it drives me nuts too.
jason
1564
Zipper merge works great. The jackass riding the bumper of the guy in front of him so that I am forced to let 2 people merge in front of me instead of 1 deserves to get 4 flat tires.
Then you are not making use of available resources. As posted earlier, if everybody co-operated, we’d have a better traffic flow. If you deliberately choose to not use an open driving lane, then its your choice. I choose to use an open driving lane. I do not drive on shoulders. I do not swing into acceleration lanes from on-ramps. I’m driving in a legal lane. So rage all you want.
That’s fine, so long as you’ll understand when I refuse to let you merge.
I wonder if it’s the gas prices, but it seems to be getting worse here in Austin. I keep seeing people cut around people yielding to turn left. They don’t cut around to go straight. They cut around to turn left…
Rephrasing:
I spit in the eye of math! Damn that damn science that shows my need for some perceived justice or politness is bollocks! Damn it to hell!
Matt
You’re talking perfect world. When every driver on the road knows about the math/science (and we know how much the average American LOVES math and science) and we all work together to keep traffic moving, it’ll be great. Right now, it’s not happening.
I suppose it depends on where you live. Boston is infamous for idiotic drivers. Mainly, they seem to believe it’s perfectly OK to just go wherever they like. For example, they’ll pull out into a road, blocking traffic in one direction, so they can make a left turn when the opposite lane clears.
Despite this, we get fairly well executed zipper merges more often than not.
Back driving in the DC/Northern VA area, the big slowdown was often people getting onto/leaving the High Occupancy Vehicle lanes, but everyone seemed to know the rule of “One person from the throughput lane, one person from the merge lane, we don’t need a traffic cop to guide us like a grade school fire drill”.
There is no perfect world. But if you actively work against what you know to be the best way, you are contributing to a less perfect world.
To be fair, it is not like the studies are always right, or that you can not often find competing ideas and results in different studies. But in this case, the known science, says that acting logically, rather than whatever it is to not let people in, is better for the flow of traffic. Which is better for everyone want to get to X faster.
So hence, even though it may make your teeth grind at first, you should change your behavior.
Rebuttal?
Rebuttal?
My rebuttal is my bike, which I now ride to work. I’m out. Heh…
There’s a Subway (eat fresh!) near my work where there are about four sandwich makers, but only one cashier. The cashier operates at about half the speed of a normal human. So the sandwiches are completed a lot faster than they can be processed.
At lunch time, when the queue is out the door, the sandwich makers are literally shouting from their stations to people near the end of the line “WHAT KIND OF SANDWICH?!” Customers either shout back in bafflement or don’t notice, leaving the sandwich-maker standing there looking annoyed. They don’t seem to realize that this shouting game doesn’t make things move faster.
Your assembly-line is broken, guys.
Needed to log onto a site last night only to find that I’d forgotten my PW. No problem, I click on the thingamajig to get it to reset. It sends me out a ‘hey, someone, hopefully you, said they needed a reset. If that’s true, click here’. I click there. They then send me out a new temporary password. Except it doesn’t work. So I do it again. And that one doesn’t work. Goddammit, guys. Goddammit.
I think that is a perfect solution.
Argh, those lane-changers should be surrounded, dragged out of their vehicles, swiftly judged by a jury of their traffic-stuck peers and then hanged at the nearest lamppost. And then drawn and quartered by cars.
It’s even worse when they’re 80 foot long semi trucks.
Quitch
1579
Damn these people who use the road efficiently!
It’s a self-serving efficiency that actively slows everything else down. It could be argued there wouldn’t be a 5 mile line of cars if people would stop shoe-horning their way in at the last second. All those little foot taps and delays add up.
