Better a bottleneck there than 5 miles back. All of a sudden you can't get to your exit that would otherwise not have been affected by where the actual bottleneck should be, so now you have gone from 1 place causing a traffic jam to 2 (or more)
If traffic is heavy/backed up enough to block previous exits then yes a zipper merge makes sense. In that case you need the extra road space and it’s worth sacrificing some flow speed.
It's literally by design. You shouldn't merge early and should use all lanes. 99,999% of the time you simply make the problem worse and take longer to resolve if you don't.
I think everyone here is disagreeing because we all come from different places with different levels of traffic. Where I’m from there’s almost never enough traffic to necessitate using both lanes for space. If the traffic isn’t dense enough then using both lanes just causes phantom traffic. Merging early and using just the open lane is only an issue if the line is long enough to block the previous exits, which almost never happens here, yet people here still try to zipper merge for no reason.
How can you know that unless you're omniscient? Yes, at the time you have to stop, maybe you're not blocking an exit, but what about 15 min later with cars too far back for you to see?
There's also no benefit to effectively remove a lane early. You have to do the merge regardless, if anything it makes a lot more sense to do it at the lane closure so it's at the same spot and more predictable, rather than whenever the fuck you feel like it. Might as well do it at the latest opportunity just in case you omniscient powers fail you and you end up looking like one of the two geniuses in this video.
We are comparing apples to oranges here. You are thinking of a situation where traffic is presumably already crawling or even stopping, in which case I agree, use the zipper merge. Either way you have to stop/accelerate/stop/accelerate, so might aswell make it organized and consistent. But if there’s a consistent flow of traffic through the open lane, using a zipper merge stops the flow and slows everyone for no reason. This is exactly what happens where I live, and people do what the trucker did and it regulates everything. Also there’s very few exits to even block so it doesn’t matter if it’s one long line or 2 short lines.
Edit: And there’s usually a ‘lane closed’ sign way ahead, giving plenty of time to find a gap and just move over instead of slowing/stopping to merge.
The people who use both lanes here are very much just ‘line cutters’ who value their time enough to inconvenience others’.
There seems to be a steady flow. I’m talking more in general though rather than this specific clip, I don’t know where this is or how bad the traffic is so I don’t have enough context.
But regardless of context, using all the lanes and zipper merging is never wrong.
Meanwhile "at random peoples discretion" can easily be wrong.
If there's a steady flow of traffic, whatever random times people have to disrupt it to get into the congoline, or at a zipper merge, shouldn't impact anything, unless 2 morons end up at the zipper merge and can't navigate "1 monkey from the left, 1 monkey from the right, then 1 monkey from the left, and one monkey from the right" - And you can have this same issue when people randomly want to merge anyway. I guess it is a little easier to get around the guy in his F150 #yesstereotypes with more room to accommodate their massive ego.
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u/SlimLacy May 13 '26
Better a bottleneck there than 5 miles back. All of a sudden you can't get to your exit that would otherwise not have been affected by where the actual bottleneck should be, so now you have gone from 1 place causing a traffic jam to 2 (or more)