| ▲ | Sohcahtoa82 5 hours ago |
| > vehicle changes lanes in front of you; I will never understand why this is so rage-inducing for people. Changing lanes is a necessary part of navigating, even during busy traffic. People on an on-ramp will need to get in front of somebody. People needing to move back to the right because their exist is coming up will need to get in front of somebody. Your lane is not a birth right. Let people merge. > you slow down to maintain a safe following distance, another car sees a gap and changes lanes in front of you. Repeat for your entire commute. This happens because literally everyone is tailgating each other so hard that the gap in front of you is the only gap that exists for people to change lanes to either get on or off the highway. |
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| ▲ | maerF0x0 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | ehnto an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Slow down a bit to create another buffer. You can even do this before they have merged, as part of the bit where you allow them to safely merge. I think if you reflect a bit you'll find you are being the same kind of person as them, if you are getting angry that you have to slow down and give up space for someone else. I understand some people can be aggressive though, that can be frustrating regardless of the outcome. | | |
| ▲ | crazygringo an hour ago | parent [-] | | I don't think you're understanding. The point is that 20 people in a row will take advantage of your buffer to slow you down again and again and again, which makes you get to your destination later... because they're being selfish to get somewhere faster, and you're not so you get to where you're going slower. We're not talking about where they're changing lanes to take the next exit. We're talking about where your lane happens to be moving faster, so they merge in front of you in an unsafe way to take advantage of that and just stay there. Why should you be expected to give them space, as you suggest? How is that fair, that they should get to their destination faster instead of you? Do you not see how that's going to rightfully make someone angry? When they should be waiting for a safe space to open up, rather than forcing you to slow down to create one? | | |
| ▲ | carshodev 42 minutes ago | parent [-] | | If you actually want the safest option then you should merge all the way right and keep slowing down. Noone is going to merge right if they are trying to go faster, they will only do it to get off the offramp. Meaning the gap will reopen as people exit through the offramp or merge left into faster lanes. If you choose to go in the fastlane in traffic you should understand that it will have people who do not care about the following distance as much and are just trying to go as fast as possible. I have found that often times in heavy traffic the rightmost lane can be just as fast or actually faster than a middle or left lane. | | |
| ▲ | crazygringo 38 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > If you choose to go in the fastlane in traffic you should understand that it will have people who do not care about the following distance as much and are just trying to go as fast as possible. It's not about choosing to go in the fast lane. It's about the fact that in heavy traffic, you have no idea which lane will be fastest, because they're all heavy and which one is fastest keeps switching. > I have found that often times in heavy traffic the rightmost lane can be just as fast or actually faster than a middle or left lane. That's exactly my point. Which is why you can be in the right lane, and tons of people from the slower lane will try to merge in front of you if you're keeping a safe distance from the car in front. Your advice is staying in the right lane doesn't apply in these situations. |
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| ▲ | c22 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It seems like a tragedy, but actually it can be a boon as long as you travel in neither the leftmost nor rightmost lane. The majority of the traffic entering your buffer will be exiting your buffer out the other side as soon as they can, so you can just chug along at a (greatly reduced, but) consistent speed. Meanwhile, the traffic to either side of you is in standstill, paralyzed by your bow wake. | | |
| ▲ | Sohcahtoa82 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's wild to me how often the left lane is not the fastest lane. I've had times where the right lane ends up being the fastest. On I-5 near Woodburn, OR, it's 3 lanes. So many drivers, including truckers, will often stay out of the right lane entirely to avoid being caught up in traffic coming on/off. Meanwhile, the left lane is going 5 mph under the limit because there's a left-lane camper somewhere miles ahead. So I can fly past everybody in the right lane because there's actually barely any traffic coming on/off and everybody is avoiding the right lane for no reason at all. | | |
| ▲ | rootusrootus 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > On I-5 near Woodburn, OR The section of I-5 between Portland and Salem is absolutely psychotic, and I have never been able to reason out exactly why. It consistently has a left lane jammed with angry people going at or below the speed limit, a fairly normal center lane filled with cruisers, and a mostly empty right lane with the occasional big rig and regular very-high-speed cars expressing their frustration with the left lane by going 25+ mph over the limit in the right lane. I know that's what you basically just said. Just venting. The driver behavior in that section of freeway confounds me, and I do not know what the underlying cause is. It is otherwise an unremarkable bit of interstate like any other. | | |
| ▲ | crest 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's wild to me that it's allowed and accepted to overtake on the right on US highways. | | |
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| ▲ | genocidicbunny 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Truckers sometimes have a good reason to do that -- they can't brake or accelerate as quickly as a small vehicle, and thus can end up going very slowly if they stick with the right lane. To a driver going 3 exits down the 205 it's not a big deal, to a truck driver doing the same they may be at the end of a long haul up the I5 and every minute starts to count since it can affect their pay. And if you can avoid hard braking/hard acceleration in the right lane, that can help your fuel costs quite a bit since slowly coasting behind someone doing 5 under in the left lane is more efficient than jerking around in the right lane. There are plenty of ramps on I5 and 205 that I merge to the left for because I know they will spill into the right and (when it exists) middle lanes. Because of how traffic also reacts to brake lights (some people brake too hard even when they have sufficient distance to let off the gas and coast to a slower speed) it seems like it ends up making my experience through those stretches a bit better. Ultimately, any individual behaviour is largely irrelevant, it's what the whole mass of cars moving along does that affects things the most. Often you don't want to be the (significantly) odd one out regardless of the situation. | | |
| ▲ | nradov 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's not a good reason, those truckers are just assholes. I'd like to see the authorities enforce the law and fine them heavily. Put them out of business. | | |
| ▲ | engineer_22 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Driving a truck is more difficult than it seems. They are extremely heavy, very dangerous, be careful around them. | |
| ▲ | genocidicbunny 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I've done a few tours around the world on the interstate system, so I've seen my fair share of truckers. Yeah, some are assholes, but there are stretches and routes where their behaviour makes sense, even if I don't like it. It's on them for how they behave, but understanding why they behave that way can make it simpler to deal with them in real life. As real, squishy people, not a system of rules. Would I love to see CHP or OHP fine every left lane trucker in the 'no trucks in left lane' zones? Hell yes, but until that happens, I understand the trucker behaviour. |
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| ▲ | maerF0x0 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's not the fastest often because it's oversubscribed and people do not understand that the car has a 3rd, mostly underuntilized, state of neither pedal depressed (ie "coasting") ... so they create cascading braking pileups ... | | |
| ▲ | crest 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | If everyone that had it turned adaptive cruise control sigh. |
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| ▲ | rootusrootus 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > as long as you travel in neither the leftmost nor rightmost lane What I really hate, however, is that plenty of people will cruise in the center lane but still not leave a decent gap between them and the car in front. They effectively turn a three lane freeway into two one-lane freeways by hobbling the ability of anyone else to switch lanes. The freeway moves way smoother when there is a modest, predictable speed differential between each lane so that people can find their way into the next lane over without having to force the issue. |
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| ▲ | a_e_k 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Not to mention if that if somebody needs to come over, the proper thing to do is signal first. Then I'm happy to politely ease off a bit and open more space for them to come over safely. It's the people who aggressively slide right over just a few feet in front of me (cutting off nearly all of my safety buffer) without so much as a signal that really drive me nuts. | | |
| ▲ | maerF0x0 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's the people who hit the gas when they see your signal, that really irk me. In Austin I stopped signaling because it was a punished behavior. | | |
| ▲ | genocidicbunny 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | My experience driving in MA and NY was similar, but so often it was because a rusted out shitbox was trying to merge in that would slow down traffic significantly, and not only put me at risk of rear ending them, but being rear ended myself. When flows merge, there's turbulence. There's less turbulence if the flows are more closely matched, including speed. |
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| ▲ | genocidicbunny 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Unless I'm the last car in a line and there's plenty of open space behind me. Then you should just wait until after I've passed before merging, because otherwise you create a little ripple in the flow. A few ripples and you got a wave, and that's how you get traffic. So for the love of gods, if you're merging, even if you signal, match speeds for merging. If you're too slow to match speed, then suck it up buttercup, and hang out in the right lane until there's an opening. |
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| ▲ | mmooss 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That is a paranoid-survival oriented perspective. > someone is taking your safety buffer as their opportunity to travel faster Nobody is 'taking' something; we're all just sharing the road, and at little cost. People change lanes for many reasons, and sometimes to pass someone else and travel faster. That's what the left lane (if we're talking about the US) is for. > results in you having to travel slower and slower to maintain the gap that is constantly consumed, I understand the theory but that hasn't happened in my experience. And even if five or ten cars got in front of you, how much distance is that? A random Internet site says the average midsize car is 16 feet; add 220 ft safe driving distance at 75 mph (says another random website), so let's say 240 ft per car x 10 cars is 2400 ft. In that extreme circumstance, it will cost you ~30 seconds. It's self-fulfilling: If you act aggressively toward other drivers, they will respond in kind. If you treat them respectfully and politely, they act the same way toward you. People behave well and kindly, naturally. We are social creatures. |
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| ▲ | chausen 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | leviathant 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The trick I keep in mind in situations like this is to look at brake lights ahead of me. If cars are braking and I'm accelerating, I'm probably going to end up driving very inefficiently. By letting off the accelerator, I don't close the gap as quickly, and eventually, the turbulence in the traffic flow steadies out. Instead of stopping and starting, I roll at an averaged out speed, which doesn't feel as frustrating (it's kind of relaxing) and is better for fuel economy. There are, of course, the weavers who jump from gap to gap, tailgating and pushing. Sometimes it works, sometimes they just get jammed up. I don't drive as often as I used to, but on I-76 coming into or out of Philadelphia, traffic gets snarled and becomes stop-and-go. Every now and then, someone next to me appears to have the same understanding of fluid dynamics as I do, and we build up enough of a buffer that we are able to eliminate the stop-and-go, even if it means rolling at 5mph with a big gap between us and the cars in front of us. There's no good way to communicate what we're doing, even to each other. But I like to think that when this happens, it has a positive effect that ripples out for miles. | | | |
| ▲ | frogulis an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Funny that I could guess that the link would be to that CGP Grey video :D Adam Something has a video responding to it that's worth watching too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oafm733nI6U | |
| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | Dylan16807 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | overfeed an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I will never understand why this is so rage-inducing for people Putting my armchair psychoanalyst hat on: I think American society embeds a need to be the "winner", and are you winning if end up behind another driver who's contending for "your" spot? If you've driven elsewhere for a while, you start noticing subtle driver differences, such as drivers who want to merge into your (slower) lane never braking to merge behind you and always accelerating to do so, even when you're at the tail end of a vehicle chain in your lane. |
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| ▲ | frogulis an hour ago | parent [-] | | Driving in Melbourne -- I won't generalise to the wider Australia -- is often much the same. Comparing to the experience of being a passenger on a bike in Saigon, the level of cooperation there is way higher, possibly due to a sort of necessity.
I had this feeling while observing traffic there, that, while the latency and throughput of the roads during high traffic times are still kinda awful, at least for bikes there's a slow continuous progress that simply wouldn't exist without cooperation. Funnily enough, my experience driving in Los Angeles was distinctly not terrible. Traffic was usually good enough to drive in, though there was very little regard for the speed limit on the freeways! I suspect I may have just been lucky to miss the worst of the traffic. |
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| ▲ | loeg 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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). |
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| ▲ | Sohcahtoa82 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | When traffic is heavy, everyone is likely following at [what they perceive to be] a minimum following distance. It's simply not possible to merge during heavy traffic without eating into someone's safe following distance. | |
| ▲ | MPSimmons 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The buffer exists to be used. Allowing people to merge into it makes the lane that they came from safer. Build a new buffer. |
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| ▲ | ehnto an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Might depend on your location, but usually you are legally required to allow a merge. Which makes sense, the system stops working when two lanes that are required to merge, don't merge because people are being petty and entitled. |
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| ▲ | aeontech 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | genocidicbunny 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | You shouldn't be braking when changing lanes is what I was taught, you should be matching the speed of the lane you're merging to. There are many drivers who think that braking is always the right solution, when sometimes it's a little more gas. And in inclement conditions, it can make the difference between losing control of your vehicle or not. When you brake, you decrease your steering ability in most cars. Fine when its calm and sunny in CA, not so much when it's icing over near Ashland OR on the pass. | | |
| ▲ | aeontech 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well, sure - braking is mostly relevant when merging to the slower lane, when merging to faster lane I generally do not need to - since that lane is already moving faster, just need to speed up slightly and time it for the right moment. My point is, it feels safer and easier to aim to enter a new lane with the aim of "following" someone, rather than trying to rush in "ahead" of someone. But maybe it's just me. |
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| ▲ | observationist 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | crest 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > 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. |
