I’ve been watching traffic patterns for a while… Pretty much since I started driving.
I’ve wanted to answer the question of why does traffic get so bad sometimes?
The best analysis I can give from all of my observations is… People SUCK at merging. They don’t give space, they try to race to the “front” in lanes that are closing… Nobody actually knows how to zipper merge properly.
Listen, there’s basically two things you need to successfully zipper merge:
Find an opening where you can fit into
Match pace with the traffic you will be merging into.
For anyone in a lane that’s being merged into: make space for merging traffic.
I know legally, that the driver entering the lane will have to find space to merge into, and the drivers in the lane where others are merging into, don’t have a legal requirement to provide space, but by being a dickhead about it, you’re actively choosing to make things worse for everyone. Just give some space. It’s really not hard.
Everyone is more interested in getting somewhere fast, rather than doing things efficiently, in collaboration with fellow road users… So, when someone inevitably gets cut off by someone who simply must be in front, and they have to slow down, it takes a lot of time for the impact from that showdown, to be recovered by traffic behind the offender.
But trying to re-educate millions, if not billions of drivers to not be horrible at merging, isn’t something that’s realistically going to happen.
Whenever you hear about “congestion” slowdowns, this seems to be the cause just about every time.
I can actively see this on some highways near me, they have an exit on one stretch of highway through a fairly large city, every mile. I can almost time it for when we get to an exit, vs when we get to an on-ramp, simply by when we slow down or speed up, exclusively due to this phenomenon.
Crashes and wrecks are a whole other issue. Between everyone being shit at merging, all the goddamned rubberneckers, and people making generally idiotic choices to change lanes when they have no idea what is going on… We’re fucked.
I don’t hate traffic because it’s slow. I hate traffic because it’s entirely a product of people being stupid.