4 ms·

not a gotcha question, I'm actually curious: how does a human driver know where to be in the lane?

• frosted-flakes 5y ago
  Context. The faint wear marks that tires make on the road over years, the seam between lanes, the car in front of them, the distance away from the guardrail or ditch, or there are no marked lanes at all and you just have to share the road with oncoming traffic. Furthermore, it's not uncommon for three lane roads to turn into two lanes during heavy snow, and in those case, the lanes are wherever everyone decided they were, collectively.
• riffraff 5y ago
  I think this is a very good question! The case I was thinking of is a highway I was in last week, where temporary work has one of the directions going through the other direction, so the 2+emergency lanes in one direction become 2 lanes without emergency in one direction and one lane in the opposite one. In this case, there are temporary lane markings on the ground indicating you should not follow the old ones, but rather align yourself further to the right then you would normally do. OTOH, I am familiar with the situation in Rome where often the lane markings are deleted and a road may be 2-3-4 lanes depending on how people queue up, in which case people would generally rely on social/experience cues, which I'm unable to formalize.