Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road

[ijmorlan]

You're supposed to use the entire lane, it's called a zipper merge and actually leads to traffic moving more efficiently.

But there is always that one guy (gal) who drives down the middle of both lanes because they don't think you should be passing on the right.... I've always been a believer that we paid for that asphalt, we should be using it.  There was a poll in the Record a few years back where about 50% of drivers think its OK to use the entire lane, and 50% think you should be merging way back and your a jerk for bypassing the stopped traffic....

Coke

The correct way to behave in a merge is to match speed with the other lane. Pick a car in the other lane and drive next to it. Ok, don’t drive precisely next to it — drive where you can be seen most effectively. But the point is to force both lanes to run at the same speed. This way, you aren’t merging early (incorrect behaviour), but you also aren’t jumping the queue (also incorrect behaviour). When you get to the proper merge point, you will likely have no trouble executing the merge because the people you’ve been driving next to will understand what you’re doing.

If enough people started doing this, the effect at some point would be to change the dynamic of the merge from “one lane wins” to a symmetric merge.

It would help of course if correct signage were used, which it is not. These are always signed as either left lane merges into right or right into left. Instead, signs that are the mirror image of each other should be used to indicate that both lanes merge into each other with neither lane having priority. This could be indicated in paint by having the dividing line between the lanes split into two dividing lines which would then split apart to meet the outside lines coming together as they reduce from being two lanes apart down to one lane apart. Then everybody has to cross a dashed line which further reinforces that everybody has to take note of the traffic in the other lane.

This doesn’t cover every situation. For example, what about a merge from 3 lanes down to 2? Or on a highway where a lane doesn’t end, but instead exits. But by far the most common case is a simple reduction from 2 lanes to 1.