It's frustrating because someone is taking your safety buffer as their opportunity to travel faster. And it results in you having to travel slower and slower to maintain the gap that is constantly consumed, tragedy of the commons style, by opportunists.

It brings me peace to see other people thinking this way. You should be an active participant on the highway, making decisions to maximize flow. Leaving space so people can merge, controlling speed to smooth slowdowns, anticipating traffic patterns, etc.

All of the people tailgating are contributing to the congestion.

https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE

The problem isn't merging, it's people that are changing lanes to get ahead.

It's especially not people trying to get off the highway because then they leave and you can catch back up to where you originally were.

It's frustrating when it eats into your safe following distance. The driver merging in ahead of you is being dangerous and not leaving a safe following distance for themselves (or you).

I'll tell you what I specifically and intentionally do when I need to change lanes. I brake slightly, signal, and wait for the person on my right or my left to pull ahead of me, then change lanes immediately _behind_ them. Then sit there for a moment until my following distance evens out a bit.

This ensures that

a) I do not cut anyone off accidentally, and minimize the amount of stress in my immediate part of the universe

b) I will (most likely) have plenty of room behind me after I change lanes, reducing chances of anyone else running up on me

c) If there's noticeable traffic, the time I spend signaling and waiting for the person to move slightly ahead of me gives plenty of warning to the people _behind_ them that I'm about to enter the lane.

Ultimately, yes, of course in principle you're right, when I change lanes, I enter the lane in front of someone.... but I _can_ control whether I enter as far as possible ahead of them.

It's considerate communication. Lurching into the next lane .08 seconds after the blinker first flashes says things like "Your life isn't worth the basic consideration and respect of communicating my intentions" and scales up to "I'll communicate, but you're not worth any sort of common courtesy" - that can be upsetting to people.

It doesn't even have to be real. There's huge room for miscommunication. Unpredictable movements and perceived aggression, or unwillingness to be considerate to other drivers on the road, there's a whole wealth of information being processed, regardless of how little is actually real.

Now add the total lack of accountability for the driver's emotional state (don't you love yelling at other drivers, completely free of judgement?), and you can see how things spiral into road rage so relatively easily, even if everyone involved is normally a pretty chill, rational person.

If you're tailgating or brake-checking, or being inattentive and sloppy, you're basically threatening people's lives with a few tons of high speed metal, even if you don't intend that at all.

Ideally, the rules of the road are meant to reinforce a mutual understanding of the game being played. Behavior occurring when expected, proper signaling, observing limits, and making the effort to communicate where possible is a signal that you and the other driver are both operating by the same set of rules, giving you both confidence that neither of you are going to be a danger.

I've seen little "cute" exceptions where locals develop a subculture of dangerous assumptions and then get aggravated when someone from out of town doesn't immediately get it. There are other areas where aggression and what amounts to flagrant disrespect are the norm, so you've always gotta be adaptive, but ideally you get people conspicuously following the same set of rules as a sort of game theoretic optimal strategy for driving.

> I will never understand why this is so rage-inducing for people.

The train of tought goes something like this. You want to get to your destination quickly as just like everyone else and are doing everything correctly, but the assholes exploit that safety distance as a gap available for them to switch into and repeatedly forcing you to break to maintain a safe distance. Oh and the even less rational people think everyone overtaking them has stolen their rat race position.

Leaving a keeping a safe distance feels unsafe since other drivers will squeeze into it. Subjectively it feels safer to close the distance, but the numbers don't lie. Tailgating kills.

Yes. If people are constantly moving into your appropriate head way this is doubtless annoying but the correct response is allow yourself to decelerate slowly to re-open that space again, repeat as many times as necessary, even if it means a bunch of agros end up in front of you. Better for them to be in front where you can see them, than behind or to the side, were you can't.

Absolutely agree. I take it a step (probably too far) further and think if you’re breaking on the motorway at all, you’re a bad driver. Ok, sometimes you have to, it’s chaotic out there, I get it. If you’re paying attention to actually driving your two ton killing machine you can drive for 200 miles on a motorway and not touch the break once.

I just had to hard brake a few days ago. A driver a couple lanes over on 101 slammed on their breaks, rotated 90 degrees, and came to rest across a couple lanes (one of which was mine). Fortunately, I was alert, driving the speed limit, and in the right-most lane, with nobody following me close. The whole thing happened in less than 5 seconds.

If you do it on the regular, or even occasionally, sure, but emergencies are emergencies.

Or stuck on a highway with bad drivers. My local paper's current "bleeds => leads" story is about a head-on highway crash, between a big pickup truck and a wrong-way driver. Less that 4 hours after being posted, that story has already slipped off the front page.

It doesn't normally require hard braking, but when automated emergency braking decides to slam on the brakes at random for no reason in my own car, everybody behind me will share my resulting insurance rate increase.

It's almost as if the purpose of the system is what it does.

I'm not sure it's that negligible. Mythbusters found that weaving in and out of traffic could save between 5 and twenty-five percent. Now A) Mythbusters did an experiment with an N of like 4 or something, along a single commute in the Bay Area, so it's basically anecdote and I'd love a better source if one existed, but it is at the very least proof-by-existence that larger impacts on travel time _can_ happen. And their non-weaving person was, if I recall from the video, not constantly decelerating to keep a buffer.

And from personal experience in some places, keeping such a buffer, in some traffic conditions would just literally be impossible. There are sometimes enough aggressive drivers such that they can just consume it faster than one would be able to create it. It is simply not always the case that you have sole power to create and keep the recommended buffer size (although very often it is and you can).

I keep a decent buffer whenever I am able, but at some point, you have to bow to road conditions.

Letting a large fraction of the freeway cut in front of you will turn normal drivers behind you aggressive, or at least aggressive enough to go around you. There's a balance to be struck.

>I was never honked at, even by the crazy semi truck drivers.

Because you were towing a camper and "slow and in the right lane" fits people's mental model of how recreational/nonprofessional heavy traffic or otherwise "handicapped" vehicles ought to behave.

When you have problems is when you behave to a standard beneath what other people expect from whatever kind of traffic you are.

Even that can be tricky, with the indecisive behavior people use when merging.

> and you're expected to keep up with the flow of traffic.

This is very state dependent, if we are talking about legality.

In WA state, for example, there is no "flow of traffic" law or similar. The limit is the limit, and any excess of the speed limit is illegal regardless of what all other drivers are doing. So even if the right/slow lane is going 100MPH through the 70MPH zone, you are legally expected to still go 70.

Thankfully we do have laws against left lane camping, but I rarely see it enforced.

In my place, there's a significant group of drivers who will ride your tail too close hoping you'll move over so they can get 1 car ahead. And if they see more than 0.9 car length in front of you they will do what they can (weaving other lanes) to try and get into that space, 1 car ahead of you.

As far as I can tell it's pure selfishness and competitiveness. Their desire isn't to cooperate and arrive it's to take from others for their own gain.

Also "Only pass in the left lane" only makes sense when the lanes aren't significantly full. The guy in the left lane wants to do 90mph but the average speed of traffic is <55mph. Should I move over just because I'm doing 55 (despite wanting to do 65) and they want to do 90? They can only do 90 if there's a cascading group of drivers in front of them who defer their own desires to the desire of the most aggressive. Seems obvious to me that moving over to let them pass is not the right move.

These comments make me grateful that we have the concept of 'lane discipline' in the UK. It's rare to see the 'fastest' lane be anything other than the outside one. Otherwise we keep left and out of the way.

https://www.highwaycodeuk.co.uk/lane-discipline.html

I always wonder why so many people observe this when I never have. It makes no sense logically; it's the speed of the car in front of you that determines whether they should switch lanes, not the size of the gap behind it. There is no reason for them to cut in when your lane is no faster. Perhaps you are just the sole person leaving enough room for people to execute needed lane changes.

At any rate, even if people are continuously going around you like water going around a rock in a stream, you only have to drive 2 mph slower than traffic to constantly rebuild your following distance from the infinite stream of cutoffs. But my experience is the majority of following distance is eaten up by people randomly slowing down, not cutting in.

Just drive in the slow lane and you won’t have this problem. The people cutting in front of you rarely want to be in the slow lane.

I don't know you can find that traffic always bunches up. And if one is content to sit in the gaps in between, almost never anybody cuts in. I drove twice 1000 mile trips each way last year and it kind of worked. It's more of a mindset than anything else. Fastlane is not that fast or it would be empty, lol.

> That's 7 lanes you need to cross if you're in the HOV lane.

The 401 is my favourite with eighteen lanes, four for the inner express lanes, and five for the collector lanes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Highway_401#/media/Fil...

Wow, I didn't know that was a thing. Been driving nearly 30 years, and never had a windshield chip.

Another trick that works is just to let the windshield get cracked once. Then it will be immune to further rock strikes. Studies have shown that freshly replaced windshields are 937% more likely to be hit with a rock.

#trustmebro

#science

> Is the end result just a couple of minutes later in a 30 minute commute?

More like a few seconds.

Every car that merges in front of you only costs you their following distance. If the average following distance is 1 second, then you are simply 1 second slower than you'd have otherwise been. So unless this is happening continuously every 30 seconds on your 30 minute commute, you will lose less than a minute.

The "but if I kept reasonable following distance, people will keep merging in front of me and I'll lose time" excuse is pretty thin given this analysis.

And an insurance claim can easily eat 40 hours of time between the insurance companies, other lawyers, buying a new car, medical appointments and recovery. That's 19,200 minutes you won't get back, or about 52 years of driving 1 minute slower each day.

Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

It doesn’t - but people don’t necessarily make rational choices regarding speed and driving. There’s a tendency to de personalize other drivers.

A slight increase in average speed really only makes a significant difference over long drives. (5 mph increase over a 10 hour drive can cut off 50 minutes).

Otherwise we are talking about small differences in efficiency.

(I would be very open to another opinion here.).

My opinions are formed by nearly ~2 million miles driven at this point, two different driving courses, and the motorcycle safety course.

One thing I truly think that’s overlooked is how reduced road noise in the vehicle cabin can both reduce driver fatigue, but also frustration in traffic.

It used to be more of an issue when I was younger. Now that I'm older and more 'seasoned' (plus reflexes do slow down), I'm far more patient and have no issue maintaining a healthy following distance. I think the statistics reflect this in age vs. accident rate as well.

Unfortunately, sometimes over a 45 minute freeway commute, dropping back repeatedly means arriving 15 minutes or more later. Again, no big deal now, but it was somehow unacceptable when I was younger.

I have been doing the same commute at the same time for the better part of a decade. At this point I can look at my watch and tell if I'm ahead of schedule or behind schedule and infer what the compounding effect will be later in my commute.

I can easily shave 10% off my commute by lane changing to avoid the lanes where turn lane traffic tends to back up into the travel lanes, ramp traffic and "problem people". I test the null hypothesis several times a month by carrying bulky topheavy cargo that precludes a bunch of lane changing without more effort than I want to put in.

I don't think there's much to be gained by simply lane changing to chase fleeting gaps in traffic. The wins and losses will probably mostly cancel out.

We have something like that in eu with road markings. Both for clear weather and fog/rain. They mark some of the lines differently, and tell you how many lines you should have between you and the car in front. I think they were first trialed and then printed in several places.

I think a lot of people would just consider that a challenge.

On the occasion when I am towing our travel trailer, it is really incredible how unsafe that makes other drivers act around me. They will jam themselves in front of me at all costs, with no consideration for physics.

Can't wait to get blinded by lasers when cars are going over bumps and speed humps.

I know you were probably writing tongue in cheek, but that is one of those "solutions" that doesn't stop bad actors and makes good actors more miserable than usual.

There was a bike light that projects a bike lane onto the road, not sure why they are not more popular.

My original observation wasn't worded as well as it could have been. I meant in situations where hard braking could be required on a moment's notice for no particular reason (e.g. Chicago freeways where everyone is doing 70 mph bumper-to-bumper and decreases to 10 mph all of a sudden).

Indeed, when someone changes lanes in front of me, I gently let off the accelerator, but as someone else noticed, that can enrage drivers behind me (I don't take it personally), and I'm definitely traveling fast enough to remain in the middle lanes.