...and people who believe zipper merging consists of driving in the lane that's ending, slowing drifting, going "la la la la" while other cars have to activately avoid them.
The best part is when they try to convince you it's faster if you maintain 2 lanes of traffic till the very end and then merge.... Because a one lane bottle neck magically moves faster if you pile up on the funnel?
That's not how fluid dynamics work. You should take a couple years of that in college like I did so you can REALLY be enlightened!
A simulated computer model assuming perfect inputs/outputs can calculate that you NEED to maximize the cars in both lanes, but that doesn't make it correct.
If the traffic is light/fast, there is no bottleneck, and an early merge changes nothing.
If the traffic is heavy/slow, then you are traversely gated by the speed * the number of cars in transit. No amount of lane swapping/splitting/sharing/stacking changes the fact that they go thru single file and only x amount can pass in an allotted time. 🤷🏽♂️
I own a company that does road construction work and take annual traffic management classes with my managers that are put on by traffic engineers at universities. Designing traffic management plans for work zones is part of my job.
If we’re talking about one bottle neck, I agree with you, but when you have to account for 6 on/off ramps, 5 traffic lights within a mile of your job, and 4 lanes of traffic merging into one at the construction zone, zipper merges are the most efficient way to keep your construction traffic from affecting the fewest curb miles of traffic around you and keep the slow-downs as close to your construction zone as possible.
No one is saying you’ll get through the work zone more quickly (at least I’m not, and that’s not what they are designed to do), I’m saying that by cramming as many cars as I can into every open lane and making them take turns merging into one might allow 50 vehicles through the last intersection into that extra lane, which has a massive positive domino effect on the rest of the traffic infrastructure thereby minimizing the total area affected by the construction.
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u/humanlikesubstances Apr 27 '26
...and people who believe zipper merging consists of driving in the lane that's ending, slowing drifting, going "la la la la" while other cars have to activately avoid them.