I went on a trip yesterday and I tried it, it sure didn’t seem to work at all, one person who is stubborn, slow or whatever can mess the whole thing up.
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extensively. daily. anyone who picks up their kid at school inevitably has to flow through several. its generally not a problem unless someone isnt paying attention, or just being an ass.
I want to start keeping some bumper magnets in my car for the latter category. Like that guy who tossed them onto shopping cart abandoners. Really gets me grumpy when people just zip in without zippering.
I think it is the law in PA, but it is at the very least, posted to use both lanes to merge point and then alternate. It worked well in my experience. It was quite a shock when i moved to Maryland and merging was so lawless.
As a Bay area native, I’ve never encountered worse drivers than the entire state of Maryland.
Bumper to bumper traffic moving at 80+ mph on the Baltimore beltway is something else.
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Where I live it’s easily 50/50, nobody wants to wait their turn. You can tell who’s gonna be problem too because they always have fancy rich people cars.
Honestly this is one of the few things that have improved in driving over the years. There’s still the occasional douchecanoe who rides in between both lanes to keep anyone from getting by, but that is now the exception as far as I’ve seen.
When 99% of traffic has already formed a single lane then the guy trying to go past a bunch of people and cause an extra unnecessary merge is the asshole and I’m not letting him by.
That used to be my old daily commute. Everyone had already “zipped up” were now in a bumper to bumper column, yet people just fly down the right and then cutoff the whole column to get in. Delaying everyone. Anytime I bring up this “problem” I am told it’s actually not a problem, it’s the way it’s supposed to work, and apparently I am the asshole for complaining about 2 dozen people cutting me off every morning, before I can move past one choke point.
I might be wrong about this, but I think you’re supposed to wait until the last minute to zipper merge. That way, everyone gets the benefit of it.
This is correct.
Idk about any of it. All I know is after they redid the highway and made those two lanes merge at that point, there is now a 10-15 minute backup, when previously traffic in that area was hit or miss. If there is actual traffic it can take almost 30 minutes to go through that one point.
And the trucks are so darn fed up with it that they just block off the end of the lane end now, as they can get caught cutoff by cars for seemingly endless time, they become sitting ducks.
I feel like it’s hit-or-miss. A lot of people will zipper merge, but a lot of other people don’t care and mess things up.
In Georgia? 75% chance it works
In Florida? 0% chance of yes
florida man: looks down. pulls. “yup. it’s merged.”
Floridian here confirming that 0%
In Atlanta it’s like a -55% chance it works
Yes, I see it happen successfully every day on my way home from work.
Like once, but generally naw.
I’d say it’s pretty typical where I live in the US. Yeah, there’s always a couple of assholes, but most people stick to it.
If two cars from one of the queues go through without letting someone in, then the pattern just resumes right after that
I think a lot of it is regional. In big city-center-compacted cities it works well, NYC being a great example. In suburbs it’s sort of sloppy or depends on the area. In sprawling everyone-in-SUV-8-lane-highway cities, places like LA or Houston, it’s an absolutely hopeless shit show of selfishness.
I have theories on why it’s that way, but all I really know is that’s what I have observed.
I’ve never seen a zipper merge work in high traffic, but I have seen “right lane ends” work more-or-less fine. Same effect, but people on the right lane drivers are a bit more likely to yield which makes people in the left lane slightly more likely to make room.
We’re often not a smart species.
Yes and no. Some people think that the zipper merge would improve traffic flow, and eliminate backup at a merge point. I say that it’s not failure to zipper-merge that causes backups, but it’s backups the provide the conditions in which people fail to zipper-merge.
We can divide traffic at a 2-lane-to-1-lane merge into three conditions: Traffic volume that 1 lane can handle; traffic volume that’s too much for 1 lane, but 2 lanes can handle; and traffic volume that’s too much for 2 lanes. Obviously, too much traffic for 2 lanes, in 2 lanes, is already a traffic jam, and a zipper merge cannot fix it. Traffic volume appropriate for 1 lane, but that’s spread out over 2 lanes can easily coalesce into 1 lane. The zipper merge is good and appropriate in this scenario, and this is where I’ve seen it work the way some people think it should. But that’s not zipper-merge magic. Merging early works, too, because a volume of traffic that fits in 1 lane, well, fits in 1 lane.
It’s the scenario in which there’s traffic that fits in 2 lanes has to merge into 1 lane that’s the problem. Just like how you can’t fit a water buffalo in your carry-on bag, no matter what clever packing technique you employ, there are just too many cars for 1 lane, and there’s going to be a backup. It’s only after there’s a backup that the conflict between the merge-early and zipper-merge people arises, so picking one or the other can’t change the basic fact of the traffic backup. At best, the zipper merge reduces the spatial length of the queue of cars waiting to merge, but does not improve the throughput of vehicles at the merge point.
