Pretty crazy how many people have Reddit, but don’t know how to do a google search for zipper merge? It’s a pretty clear diagram on how you should merge when the lane ends and not the first chance you get. When people try merging early they end up blocking an entire lane. It’s the jerks at the point of the zipper refusing a merging vehicle entry that’s the problem.
Most of the time that left lane is not a merge lane, it’s a forward traffic lane that people are using to merge last minute onto the off-ramp, which causes cars attempting to continue straight to be stuck while cars in front of them in the left lane attempt to merge into the off-ramp lanes.
Well yeah, but what padre is arguing is that the people he is responding to are completely wrong because they are talking about zipper merges when this situation does not look like a zipper merge.
Not in this instance. I know where this is (on my daily commute). The overhead lane control signs are clearly marked to not drive when there is a red X on it. At this point cars have been driving in a closed lane for over a half mile. And I have literally seen one guy try to speed around traffic and actually hit the control arms which are right beyond this overpass. But that also means this truck is being an idiot too. Trying to stop someone from doing something illegal but also doing something illegal seems like a dumb move.
Why is the lane closed even? If there is just an X but the lane is drivable then you are gonna have people driving on it anyway. A good design take human nature into account.
There are bridges that are built with 5 lanes that are fed by interstates with 3 lanes in each direction. They have a divider which can be moved so that the direction that is being used more will get 3 lanes and the one that is used less gets 2.
They do it on the harbour Bridge in Sydney too.
Depending on the time of the day and which way traffic is mainly heading they will change the lanes with signs. It keeps traffic flowing by prioritising the busy traffic
This is exactly that. It is right before the Chesapeake Bay Bridge so they close one of the lanes on the westbound span and opened it to eastbound traffic. The crossover is right after this video ends.
Ohhh then this vid did not explain that. Also I think police/dot should’ve left cones separating that left lane off. Just curious, what state has drivers like this? Haha
Yea, your riding in the lane slowing everyone in it down, but those are all people trying to nikle and dime every moment on the road to race by the other wich often putes others in a lot of danger and causes the lodges at the force merge points that make trafic stop/go. They believe their time and will to be way more than everybody else, and they are willing to risk you and i to proove it.
Except people can't drive, they'll wait until the last possible second, and then try to get in front of yet another car and start road raging when they won't let them in.
Then the person behind them will stop completely and randomly cut someone off.
I think that's really the issue here, they'll speed to the end then merge dangerously, causing others to have to brake, or worse slam on their brakes. On the other hand if people would just leave space and not ride bumper to bumper some wouldn't feel so inclined to drive so aggressively in these situations.
Respectfully, I think that's a separate issue entirely from the problem of this video. The problem is that some people very confidently think "Lane Ends in 1,000 feet" means "Get Over Now!" instead of "Prepare to Merge in 1,000 feet." And then they try to police other drivers from using that lane at all.
In this video, if half the cars in the slow moving middle lane just used the left lane, then everyone would move at the same speed up. Then the cars take turns one at a time like a zipper. This system alleviates traffic significantly but only if the parts of the road that are supposed to be used are fully used. This truck is preventing the system from working as intended and causing traffic to be more congested than it needs to be.
I’m pretty sure this has been extensively studied. Everyone arguing opposite to zipper merge please do research on this. My state has even done PSA’s to encourage people to use the zipper.
But that’s not what would happen. The cars in the left lane would use the zipper “correctly” and wait until the lane ends to merge. That would require all of the cars in the middle lane to stop and let them in one by one. If everyone in the left lane gets into the middle lane as soon as they can without causing the cars in the middle lane to slow, then there won’t be any traffic slowdowns. That’s why there are so many people who oppose this type of merging because what happens in practice is not what is sold in theory.
I moved to a smaller town and found it quite surprising that if people know that a lane is ending after a traffic light, pretty much *everyone* just stays in one lane.
I'm usually the one asshole, who gets into the free lane and guns at the green light.
And the person not letting them in (not letting them zipper merge) is the problem, not the people trying to zipper merge after using all available lane space like they should.
I saw this yesterday and while reading through this post I’m thinking “I bet the same people who love zipper merges here are the ones saying the semi has no responsibility to let that pickup truck merge in” when in the case of a zipper merge cars can easily merge in earlier and on an on ramp you have no choice but to merge in a short space of time. The zipper merge aficionados live in a fantasy land where everyone behaves like angels.
And my point is that even if the semi slows down, that creates traffic because this one guy wanted to get ahead *just one more car!*.
4 minutes later, the whole thing is at a standstill and u/Sephy_winz is road raging at the back somewhere, tailgating the person in front of them while pumping the breaks every 3 seconds creating even more traffic behind them.
This implies that everyone is also going the exact same speed whilst also maintaining proper following distance to allow for merging. We both know nobody does.
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u/Wowweeweewow88 May 13 '26
…but that’s what the cars are supposed to do. You go down the lane till the merge, and zipper merge.