10-12-2017, 07:02 AM
(10-11-2017, 11:38 PM)SammyOES Wrote:(10-11-2017, 09:22 PM)ijmorlan Wrote: That’s why I match speed with the line at a certain point, at the absolute latest the point where the merging lane mostly clears out, and then merge at the merge point.
Sadly this kills a number of the benefits of the zipper merge - it wastes a bunch of road capacity that could hold the queued cars and pushes the congestion back to the point that it impacts other roads/intersections that shouldn't need to be impacted. Not usually a problem on the 401, but horrible in the city.
The other lady in the story wasn't right at all. She did something illegal.
The only reason it wastes road capacity is because not enough people are doing it. But even with not enough people doing it, my strategy avoids setting up a conflict between me and the people in the other lane. By contrast, the people who just drive up all the way are upsetting the people who are waiting.
Additionally, depending on the exact speeds involved, the people who drive past the lineup may be creating an unsafe situation by having a high speed relative to the lane containing the lineup. Their speed also makes it so that anyone who tries to move from the lineup to the empty lane (doing their bit to use the wasted capacity) will have trouble due to needing to merge with sparser but faster traffic. By controlling the speed of traffic in the empty lane, I give people behind and in front of me the opportunity to use that lane.
I would suggest that it should be illegal to go faster than maybe 10-15km/h faster than somebody in an adjacent lane. Of course this is harder to enforce than a regular speed limit but conceptually I’m quite confident it would be a good rule for safety. In particular, I’m suggesting that people should not be passing stopped traffic at high speed.