That leads to situations that gives liability lawyers wet dreams. The whole point of the on-ramp is to enable entering vehicles to reach highway speed so that no one has to slow down nor can one safely slow down very much when the guy behind you is doing 75 and the entering vehicle is doddering along at 40. Changing lanes to allow other traffic to merge into your lane can’t always be done safely. The driver on the expressway slows down to let the driver on the ramp merge.” (The Illinois statute book phrases it thus: “The driver of each vehicle on the converging roadways is required to adjust his vehicular speed and lateral position so as to avoid a collision with another vehicle.”) 65) states, “Be ready to either change lanes or allow other traffic to merge into your lane. In California, where I lived for a while, the official driver handbook makes it clear what to do: “Freeway traffic has the right-of-way.” In Michigan the rule is, “Merging motorists shall yield the right-of-way to existing traffic and adjust their speed accordingly.” And Illinois? The Rules of the Road booklet (p. Here the problem is not lost time but risks to safety. That’s because of the many people who believe – again applying everyday manners to the road – that traffic already on the road should make way for the drivers entering it, as they might expect a stranger to scoot over a few inches to make room under an awning during a sudden rain shower. Professional truckers will tell you that merges into traffic are the most dangerous moments in their day. I know people who avoid driving on interstates (especially their big-cousins, expressways) because they fear getting onto one. Those who merge early bask in virtue, those who merge later exult in having beaten the game, but everybody is late getting to where they’re going, at a price not only of time but confusion, anxiety and anger. Here? I read that IDOT put up a sign that read, “Use both lanes, take turns at merge” but I didn’t see it, and it wouldn’t have mattered much if anyone else did. In Europe, where drivers are much better informed about how to handle road situations like this, such merges can be done safely and quickly. It wouldn’t help even if a lot of them were every driver needs to know how it works for zipper merging to work well. The problem is, few of the drivers that day were traffic engineers. Both the feds and state traffic departments have studied the problem extensively, and all came to the same conclusion: The zipper merge speeds up traffic flow by as much as 15 percent and reduces the total length of a backup by 40 percent. The maneuver is known as a zipper merge because the cars mesh like teeth on a zipper. The point of most traffic laws is to keep traffic moving, and the most efficient way to do that is for drivers in both lanes to proceed to the point of obstruction using both lanes, cars in each lane then merging alternately. But an interstate highway is not a movie line. (That’ll get you a ticket for improper lane usage, by the way.)ĭrivers who patiently get in line at bottlenecks like this one console themselves with the fact that they are doing the right thing. Such behavior is widely damned as queue-jumping, which offends some drivers so much that they pull their cars part-way out of their lane to block the offenders from passing them. By doing so they risked the wrath of their compatriots of the road. Only a few drivers continued to drive down the blocked lane, delaying merging until they reached the obstruction. Most drivers moved out of the affected lane as soon as they saw it was blocked. Work on the Des Plaines River bridge required rerouting traffic onto one lane in each direction, resulting in the mother of all merge bottlenecks. There is no traffic situation so bad that drivers can’t make it worse, as I was reminded while driving on I-55 recently.
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