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Assuming this is true, zipper merge is still a vastly preferable system. 1) It's a more effective use of the roadway. Why have 1 lane of traffic backed up for
by jkubicek 13y ago
Assuming this is true, zipper merge is still a vastly preferable system.
1) It's a more effective use of the roadway. Why have 1 lane of traffic backed up for 2 miles when you can have 2 lanes of traffic backed up for 1 mile?
2) It's equitable. Everyone moves at the same speed, there's no way to game the system for personal advantage.
- ronaldx 13y agoIt's not evident that this is a more effective use of roadway, as the article hints at. The problem is the bottleneck point, where people are obligated to move into one lane. This is what causes delay - the faster you can get cars moving through the bottleneck point, the less delays there will be behind. So it doesn't matter so much where the cars behind are positioned to wait. Zipper merge likely causes more delay - in practice - as there has to be a late negotiation over whose 'turn' it is to merge. If this negotiation is planned earlier, it doesn't need to have such an effect (in fact, I imagine it could eliminate all the delay) at the bottleneck point.
- andrewflnr 13y agoI think the point of zipper merging is that the negotiation has, in fact, been planned a couple miles before the actual merge point, so that the cars are alternating like | _ _ _ | _ _ _ Then it's easy to condense to | _ _ _ _ _ _