If you’re losing a lane on a busy road, nobody should expect to maintain full speed. That traffic is going to have to slow down somewhere, especially if the road is narrowing from 2 lanes to 1.
The zipper isn’t a miracle, it’s simply more efficient and safer, because you lose the chaos of people merging wherever they please (now everybody knows where they will merge), and you don’t leave some length of usable road empty because etiquette dictates that you vacate the closing lane ASAP. You also don’t add a line of vehicles to the open lane as long as whatever is left vacant in the closing one.
In essence, when we don’t zipper we artificially move the bottleneck back to some point before there is a physical barrier. So now your traffic that might have slowed considerably can come to a stop.
Or at a hill. On freeways, one of my personal pet peeves are people who can’t be arsed to anticipate the hill with a little extra gas. I’m big on cruise control, maintain speed please.
You nailed it. There’s a new popular business in my town, and every time I drive past it, people on a major road stop dead (when the light is green) to let people out of the parking lot. They don’t understand that the time to be nice to people in the cross streets is when the light in front of them is red.
I don’t get why those drivers act like any car next to them is more important that the cars stuck behind them.
I can’t stand it when they do this at low speeds - in the middle of an intersection. Nobody can figure out why they are riding their brakes while moving forward…really…slowly. Of course, by the time they make it through the intersection the light has changed and everyone behind them is screwed.
You are right that impatience is the real reason behind a lot of dangerous driving. I live near a small town. Most roads are 25, 35, or 45 MPH. There are traffic lights everywhere. The surrounding highways have 55 MPH speed limits. Tailgating is a huge cause of accidents, but with cars driving at the limit. I don’t understand the point of trying to drive 30 MPH over the posted limit and weaving in and out of stalled traffic during rush hour. On local roads that behavior doesn’t change (attempting to drive at least 10 over whatever is posted - even in 15 MPH school zones). You see these drivers constantly in a rush, acting like every other car is in their way, and they get caught at every light. They aren’t getting anywhere significantly faster, but they are putting other people at risk because of their refusal to slow down and follow the flow of traffic like everybody else.
Ugh. I especially love it when people weave from lane to lane, not signalling, generally cutting it way too close… only to take the next exit. I see this all the time.
I try to consider what people might be going through. Maybe that guy going way, way faster than the flow of traffic is rushing a wounded child to the hospital. Maybe that person going very slowly didn’t see the sign indicating the higher limit on this stretch of road, or isn’t familiar with this road and being very cautious.
But I have trouble coming up with excuses for certain things, and extreme impatience to the point of becoming a menace is one of them. If you really are rushing someone to the hospital, try to make sure you both get there, without taking a bunch of strangers with you.
That, and he admitted once rear-ending someone who transgressed, and in the next sentence used the term ‘not paying attention’ about other drivers who stop suddenly. Yes, they are wrong but so are you if you rear-end anyone, ever.
So how many miles of empty lane to your left or right (choose your country) would you like to crawl past in your ever-lengthening queue because everyone moved over as soon as they saw a queue rather than as they approached the pinch point? Because for every car that moved into the queue early ahead of you, you double the amount of empty lane you are going to have to crawl past until you get there, and you are doing the same to those behind you.
Frankly, “zip” signs of most types are useless, even though right. The signs should have a “DO NOT CHANGE LANE” message, and fines for doing so, with the “zip” sign about 50 metres from the pinch point.
Holy crap!? That makes way more sense now. I just assumed in the last 10 years people have become very fond of staring at their crotch while driving since it seems like nearly everyone is doing it while I walk to work in the morning, like over half the people will be staring downward at their lap while driving. I’ve watched them drive past school buses with the stop sign out and and flashing and through red lights and cross walks all the time. Another annoying driving behavior I’ve noticed is when you queue up at a crosswalk that isn’t at a stop light. People will often make eye contact with you when you’re standing on the edge of the curb about to cross and then instantly they turn their head and look at the far side of the street intently as they drive through the crosswalk like if they don’t see you in the intersection than it’s your fault if they hit you.
Apologies if it has been mentioned but another key error made by amateur drivers he missed would be not allowing plenty of braking room for heavy vehicles.
No - that empty space in front of trucks approaching lights is not for last minute lane changes!
Yeah, but if you’re going lower than the speed limit, and you don’t pull over to let people pass, you’re an asshole.
I think failing to accelerate to speed of traffic to merge onto a freeway should be grounds for losing your license. If someone, for whatever reason, can’t handle doing that, and doesn’t realize that that means they shouldn’t drive on a freeway, they shouldn’t be driving at all.
I have trouble doing this, but it’s what you are supposed to do. Overall, traffic will move the most efficiently if everyone in the closed lane stays in it and does a zipper merge at the point where it’s closed.
My car is one that one review described as “They don’t list the 0-60 time, because the engineers at Subaru are still counting” I still agree with everything this guy said. If you need to floor it all the way up the on-ramp to merge at speed of traffic, that’s what you do. If you’re in the left lane and someone behind you is going faster than you, you’re in the wrong lane.
If you are in a left-ward lane, and you are going faster than the person to the right of you, it doesn’t matter what the person behind you wants to do. All of these stilted examples spin out of these one-on-one behaviors that are not the cause of traffic–two cars is not traffic. What traffic is a wide variety of power-trains driven by people with a wide-variety of knowledge of their route and a wide-variety of sensory input about who else is on the road with them. The idea that our first concern at any moment is proper lane sorting, rather than One Easy Trick to maximising sensory data, minimising risk of accident, and maximising energy efficiency is plainly nonsense.
This is one I wish there were a solution for. When traffic is any heavier than very light, leaving proper space in front of you is simply inviting someone to slip into that space and then you’re right back where you started with someone’s bumper right in front of you. Then you slow down, then someone else slips in… It’s almost like there is an unwritten rule that if you want to go fast lane speeds tailgating is included as a non-optional accessory.
Is this in the cards for the foreseeable future? I doubt it.
For autonomous driving to work, it has to work in such a way that you or I can read a book or watch a video or take a nap while the AI does all the driving. First, because if we have to monitor/backup the AI, why bother getting one? Second, because serving in a monitor role tends to lull the operator into soporific inattention, as has been seen in several crashes of heavily automated trains and aircraft. Third, because one of the major selling points of autonomous vehicles - flexible point to point transport for the elderly and disabled - vanishes.
And letting the AI do everything means that the insurance and legal professions will have to determine the acceptable level of risk for errors by the AI. At least in the USA, I think that the acceptable level of risk will be determined to be precisely 0.00000000000000000 percent. The first time an autonomous vehicle makes a mistake and hits a bus full of eight-year-olds on their way to the Insurance Adjusters Association Family Summer Camp, every AI vehicle in the country will be decommissioned within 36 hours (maybe a day longer if it happens on a weekend).
