05-10-2016, 09:30 AM
Or think of it this way; the point of a zipper merge is to keep yourself moving at highway speed (80-100 when approaching a bottleneck). Once the speed through the bottleneck (30-60) is seen in vehicles not yet at the bottleneck (ie. full merge has occurred ahead of the final merge point), you are best to merge at the point at which this slower speed occurs.
If there's a line of 20 cars leading up to a bottleneck, and the bottleneck and those 20 cars are moving at 50km/h, if you try to jump up to the final merge point, you slow down 20 cars even below the bottleneck speed, just to get a single car in, yours, moving at the bottleneck speed. It's frustrating, but there's almost no chance of taking a situation where people have been merging ahead of the final merge point, and get it to be a zipper merge at the final merge point. To do that, you'd need to fill the empty lane between the current and final merge points, while also speeding up the speed of the cars through the bottleneck so as to allow the two lanes to move quicker than that up to the merge point, while also having the cars which just filled the empty space between current and final merge points actually sit back and let the folks who were in the steady lane go first until they can get their speed and the bottleneck speed up to an accelerated level.
Point is, once a bad behaviour starts (e.g. early merge), it's better to try going with it than correcting it. Usually the best you can do is, to use a football analogy, move the ball a couple yards, and hope that the next guy does the same. A Hail Mary will just make it worse. I'll usually make a game of it during traffic to watch the cars ahead of me accelerating and braking and attempt to find the perfect speed which allows me to feather the accelerator without ever hitting the brakes, smoothing traffic flow behind me, rather than flashing brakes and inevitably further slowing the traffic jam.
If there's a line of 20 cars leading up to a bottleneck, and the bottleneck and those 20 cars are moving at 50km/h, if you try to jump up to the final merge point, you slow down 20 cars even below the bottleneck speed, just to get a single car in, yours, moving at the bottleneck speed. It's frustrating, but there's almost no chance of taking a situation where people have been merging ahead of the final merge point, and get it to be a zipper merge at the final merge point. To do that, you'd need to fill the empty lane between the current and final merge points, while also speeding up the speed of the cars through the bottleneck so as to allow the two lanes to move quicker than that up to the merge point, while also having the cars which just filled the empty space between current and final merge points actually sit back and let the folks who were in the steady lane go first until they can get their speed and the bottleneck speed up to an accelerated level.
Point is, once a bad behaviour starts (e.g. early merge), it's better to try going with it than correcting it. Usually the best you can do is, to use a football analogy, move the ball a couple yards, and hope that the next guy does the same. A Hail Mary will just make it worse. I'll usually make a game of it during traffic to watch the cars ahead of me accelerating and braking and attempt to find the perfect speed which allows me to feather the accelerator without ever hitting the brakes, smoothing traffic flow behind me, rather than flashing brakes and inevitably further slowing the traffic jam.