4 ms·
"Do you have any proof for this, or is it just baseless conjecture?" You mean, besides empirical evidence? Nope. I see it almost every day on my commute, whi
by tmuir 13y ago
"Do you have any proof for this, or is it just baseless conjecture?"
You mean, besides empirical evidence? Nope.
I see it almost every day on my commute, which is riddled with construction. On the days that everyone merges well before the last possible moment, traffic moves at a quicker pace, because there is no one to cut you off, and my commute is shorter. On days that people decide to cut others off at the last moment, my commute is measurably longer.
If you merge ahead of time, you are more likely to find an existing gap in traffic, which has little to no effect on the traffic's speed. Whereas, if you are merging at the last possible moment, you are necessitating a gap be created specifically for you, forcing others to slow down.
If cars stay in the eliminated lane until the last moment, and then the speed of traffic increases after the bottle neck, it was the merging at the last possible moment that caused the slow down in the first place.
- jedberg 13y agoAnd this is why traffic sucks -- because people prefer to rely on anecdote instead of hard scientific facts. The behavior you are observing is not zipper merging -- it's people being assholes and trying to skip traffic. If everyone merged at the last second it would move better.
- tmuir 13y agoFrom Wikipedia: "Anecdotal evidence is an informal account of evidence in the form of an anecdote. The term is often used in contrast to scientific evidence, as evidence that cannot be investigated using the scientific method." I didn't say "this one time back in 2001". This is everyday for years. These are consistently observable data. Cars merge early, my commute is under 30 minutes. Cars merge late, and not just one or two (the north shore of chicago is chock full of entitled assholes), my commute is over 40 minutes. Sounds like a falsifiable hypothesis to me. One of the main reasons airplanes and trains are much safer than automobiles is that planes and trains have outside coordination of traffic, a third party who can see the bigger picture. Automobile traffic is thousands of individual actors who focus mainly on their own interests, and consider others around them only to avoid near term problems. Hoping everyone will magically act in concert, without government enforced obligation, is a pipe dream. Which is what the article points to, and proposes to solve with self driving cars. Self driving cars would allow the outside coordination that could facilitate zipper merging.