Be. The. Sunshine.
Be the honest dark cloud fogging up the narrative.
Just here checking in on the narrative.
It’s dark and foggy. But you’ll have to bear with it.
I know posts like that don’t actually help, but the people on the road can’t hear me when I yell at them for doing shit wrong and I need to get it out of my system.
Hot tip: if your bumper to bumper during congestion or construction periods. You need to have at least 2-3 (minimum 1) car spaces between you and the car/truck in front of you. This way you’ll maintain a steady speed (maybe btwn 2-9 mph) rather than coming to complete halt every stretch.
Yep. Tailgating causes fullstops.
Even hotter tip: on a highway, if the line on your right is free, switch to it. Left line(s) is only for overtaking.
Once drivers learn this simple rule, speed limits can be lifted on certain highway parts so whoever wants to go faster now can fulfill their desire.
But but but but
(Continuing on the meta where slowbros and campers took aim at a bumper sticker that said “keep right” with strawmen)
If we didn’t have to drive everywhere, we could eliminate these arguments 🤷♂️
increasing FB type paranoia
This post was sending me, none of yal know how to drive like a standard human.
What discussion? Zipper merge is a well defined technique.
More like half the people know how to zipper merge and the other half try to justify merging a mile early and getting angry when people pass them and zipper merge properly.
Let pedestrians and cyclists go first. Scramble walk is okay and sjould be encouraged
I hate scramble walks that act like you can’t still walk while traffic is going. The light is green just turn the walk sign on.
50/50 about it. My premise was for stop signs and or yield signs in general. But for traffic lights I’d rather it red light all around and pedestrians go where the heck they need. Like in Chicago there is busy intersections in a densely populated neighborhood that has foot traffic of bars/restaurants etc. but pedestrians have to abide by traffic’s patterns?? Like that one-five driver decides to make a right turn and bam either you hit someone or someone rear ends or block the bus or just make long queue for the cars who go past the cross walk…
I like how I stumbled into your
sjouldright after you made me imagine the scramble-walk. Somehow my brain crossed circuits and when I readsjould, my imagined scramble-walker slipped on wet pavement and half fell (and then recovered, by hitting the word “encouraged”, lol).Brains are weird.
I support this wholeheartedly. Cars should be banned.
Sorry bud, you’re the party that doesn’t understand zipper merging.
Literally the first 2 posts as I opened the app
These ‘zipper merge’ vs ‘early merge’ arguments are really the worst. At the same time, the lack of consensus fully explains why merge zones like that are such a mess.
Its funny that 102 comments will lead to meta reaction posts here in the fediverse
these days, it involves yelling
GO AS FAST AS POSSIBLE DON’T STOP DON’T YIELD ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE
If there’s heavy traffic in your city and private cars are still preferable to public transport, your infrastructure is shit and you should go pester your politicians about it
I’m in an odd situation where there’s heavy traffic but we have very good bike lanes and bike trails. Yet I am afraid to use the bike lanes most of the time because the drivers are so insane. And half the people who do ride bikes end up doing it wrong because they feel unsafe: they ride in the bike lane against traffic or just ride on the sidewalks where they become the threat: to pedestrians.
How could having my own personal space that operates on my schedule ever not be preferable to being crammed into a smelly tube with a bunch of other people?
Maybe if you gave even a fraction of care that you give your car to the people around you, it wouldn’t be smelly and crammed.
What am I supposed to do about either of those issues?
Refer to my original comment
Pester politicians? To do what? Tell people to shower and lose weight?
To build more public transport instead of parking lots and highways lanes. Then you’ll have enough space to travel comfortably.
What do I do if the public transit is pretty good and the city is walkable, but all the jobs are in office parks 40 minutes out of town?
Pester your politicians that they forgot a part of the walkable city. Either a walkable workplace or work from home.
Hello, yes. I work in construction. I carry 50+lbs (23+kg) of tools and/or material to work (which constantly changes locations as buildings and projects finished being built).
How do I fit into the walkable city plan?
So the city isn’t walkable, then
Define walkable.
I can walk to literally everything I need in my daily life except my job, and the share of residents lucky enough to work in the city can walk or bike to those too. My city scores incredibly high in both walk and bike scores; this drives real estate prices up, which drives employers to the suburbs, and—wouldn’t you know it!—the cheapest places to build office parks are situated away from the commuter transit.
except my job
That’s not walkable. The definition is not that difficult
The definition is not that difficult
Idk if you’re trolling or just obstinate, but if you don’t explain the exact definition you are using, it is impossible to determine what meets it and what does not.
For example:
Walkability is a measure of how accessible services and amenities are by foot or transit. A city is walkable if a broad range of these are thusly available.
Sure, your definition works. Your place of work is obviously included into the list of location that needs to be accessible, since it’s somewhere you commute to almost every day.
Fair enough, but I would contend “a broad range” is compatible with “all but one”
Let me just walk my 315lb welder to work each morning. Can I borrow your kids radio flyer after you walked them to school?
If your job makes you take a welder home with you at night, you need a new job.
If only the only people that use cars on a daily basis were the ones that actually need to, maybe you wouldn’t be so bitter and angry about it.
It’s strange, my coworker said the roads were really crazy last night. First light i tunred at, left turn by the way, with green arow, dude ran the red and almost hit me. Is it something in the water?
This is every day where I live. It’s madness. Otherwise, the place is paradise. Beautiful area. People are great here. Until you get them into a car. Then they are inattentive, pushy, and unsafe. People die every single year. Kids on bikes get plowed over. It’s insane.
At a 4-way intersection, if I stop around the same time as a car to my right I always yield to them according to the “right hand rule” of right-of-way. But everyone else wants to go only by “who reached the line first” and they want to time it down to the millisecond. And guess what: they always, always determine that they arrived first.
Funny how that works. They’ve changed the rule from “right of way goes to whoever arrived first, defer to car on your right when in doubt” to “it’s always my turn.”
I think it’s a barometer for the overall mental health climate. We’re any combination of overworked, broke, tired, we got news organizations trying to keep us mad at each other all the time…and then we get on the road where it’s easy to pretend those other metal boxes aren’t filled with human beings.
I’m not above it. I’ve participated in my fair share of road rage parties. And I don’t have any solutions, just observations and memes. That’s all I got.
It’s deeper than that.
People have been doing this since cars became fast. There’s something in our brains that automatically turns driving into a battle.
Nah, it’s not just driving cars - I’ve seen the same happen with shopping carts in the grocery store.
I don’t know. I have never seen a shopping cart dispute half as bad as the aggressive/asshole drivers I see every damn day. I think it’s the anonymity…
Have you been to Costco?
This is a really good observation.
And there aren’t any traffic laws for shopping carts. Of course they are also less deadly.
but a whole lot more dangerous when you have 4 turning wheels instead of 2
I mean, you roll up on anyone in an aggressive/adversarial manner, regardless of the situation, you’re more likely to encourage pushback than agreement/compliance. Even if it’s just the perception of aggression, our primate brains are wired to stand our ground. Doesn’t matter who’s wrong or right, it’s about locking horns. It’s why online arguments are the way they are.
So… Aggressivity always escalates if people interact at random without a cooling period?
That’s quite a hypothesis. Seems realistic. I wonder if anybody tested it.
I’ve got a solution. It’s called a train.
Works really well when the nearest station is over a dozen miles away from your home, and you’ve got a full load of shopping bags with you.
It boggles the mind that Americans cannot figure out any other way to buy groceries than by using a car.
I cover all of our shopping needs comfortably with a bike along with walking to the closest store.
The problem is that you’ve fundamentally fucked up your built environment, and trying to paper over your failure with car apologia is just not going to cut it
I’ve got a solution for that one too. It’s called a train station. We need to build more of them.
Who needs the actual railways, amirite?
What about a bus?
Buses are awesome too!
But I think any bus route that runs for more than 5 years should just be replaced with a tram at that point, because trams are even better. Buses are great for temporary changes to routes, but they can’t beat trams for efficiency or convenience.
Take that Centralizationist attitude back to Reddit.
I think you deserve more freedoms. Right now you’ve got a car as your option, and if you’re lucky you can walk or bike to work. I want you to have your choice of bus, train, or tram to get to work. I want all three to be available to get you there in a reasonable time. The train goes faster, but you have to walk a bit farther to the station, so it’s good for exercise. The tram is slower, but you get to see the city as you go along and it’s very disability friendly thanks to level boarding. The bus goes along the lower traffic routes, it’s more direct but comes less often. I want you to have all three of those options, plus what you already have. And then you don’t have to risk your life or road rage. You can play Mario on your Nintendo while the train takes you home from work.
That’s a lot of infrastructure. Seems like it would require an exorbitant population density to support all that.
Why are we stacking everyone on top of each other? Every person, urban or rural, needs 2 acres of cropland to sustainably provide their food. That’s 320 people per square mile of agricultural land.
Why are we cramming 25,000 people into a square mile of urban blight? Why not spread out enough that we aren’t all huffing each other’s farts?
When you spread people out, you have to build more water and gas pipes, more internet cables, more roads, deliver things farther, send the garbage trucks farther, the post, the news… It all adds up to a LOT of money. Strong Towns is a financial consultancy organisation that helps cities get out of debt, and they keep finding the same pattern, very consistently, in American cities: The urban core generates tons of revenue for the city, and then the suburbs spend it all. The suburbs are making American cities broke, because they just cost way more to maintain than the residents are paying in taxes. The city is subsidising the suburbs.
America’s “welfare queens” are the people living in detached single family homes in cul-de-sacs and making 100,000 a year. If cities charged those welfare queens a fair amount of taxes, they’d all be broke and try to move into the urban core, and the housing problems would get even worse for poor people. So cities are stuck propping up a failed economic housing model while trying to figure a way out of the crisis.
The answer that Strong Towns keeps finding is to invest more money in medium density mixed use neighbourhoods. The kind of place where you can live down the road from your office and walk there on a nice day, or take a leisurely stroll to the tram station for a day trip into the city. Those wonderful neighbourhoods full of trees, which are quiet because there are less cars, where kids can ride their bikes to school in safety, are economic powerhouses. Those neighbourhoods make more tax dollars than they spend. And I think you deserve to live somewhere like that.
The urban core generates tons of revenue for the city,
The urban core is consuming the resources produced in the rural surroundings. Again, two acres of agricultural land per urban dweller. The population density of land used by/for humans is 320 per square mile.
and then the suburbs spend it all.
Agreed, the suburbs are terrible. More specifically, lawns are terrible. Replacing all those lawns with gardens and orchards would completely reverse that problem..
But again: every 320 people need a square mile of agricultural land, regardless of how densely you decide to pack those people. There is no replacement for that land area. Whether we cram ourselves in high-rise apartment buildings, or spread ourselves out among our crops, we’re using two acres of ag land per person.
We still need the rural roads, the rural water. Vegetation needs irrigation. We still need rural wires to convey solar and wind power from those agricultural areas back to the grid at large. Internet Cabling is a little less important: lower rural population density means substantially less interference for wireless.
The answer that Strong Towns keeps finding is to invest more money in medium density mixed use neighbourhoods. … And I think you deserve to live somewhere like that.
Please don’t wish that on me. That sounds like the worst of all worlds. None of the benefits of rurality; none of the benefits of urbanity. Not dense enough to actually justify public transit, but still packed in like sardines. Needing to leave home and go into the city for any sort of entertainment. Needing transportation, because you don’t have enough room to simply be comfortable where you live. Medium-Density mixed-use areas are the easiest for City Hall to tax, and the easiest for City Hall to neglect.
It seems that “Strong Towns” is primarily interested in maximizing tax revenue. I’ve got nothing against taxes, but the purpose of taxes is to serve the people. Cramming us into maximally-neglectable units isn’t serving us. It’s exploitation.
If you think that’s a lot of infrastructure, wait until you learn how huge roads are.
You’d have a point if you were getting rid of the roads. But you’re not. You’re leaving them underutilized, out in the boondocks, where they are needed and used to service farms and mines and everything else your urban centers require. Those same roads serving population densities of <10 people per square mile are readily capable of serving population densities of 320 people per square mile. So, again, why not spread out? Why cram ourselves in like sardines, where we need buses and trains and trams and subways and rentable scooters littered everywhere?
Better than nothing
Has it started getting hot out where you are recently? There is always a spike in bad driving when the weather gets nice.
“in these hot days is the mad blood stirring” -Romeo and Juliet
Yeah, they put a drug in the water known as DHMO. It drasticly affects your brain and motor functionality.
😳 are you telling me they put water, in the water?
Yo dawg I heard you like DHMO…
An important game maybe? Being Brazilian, I’ve always refrained from driving before big soccer games started, like World Cup or championship finals. People were crazy trying to get home.
There’s cocaine in the water so maybe
The clear solution is to park on the tracks inside a light rail station.
Edit: post context
I assume it shouldn’t be one at street level. Do you recommend an elevated station or an underground one?
lol elevated for sure https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/69951707
Get creative with it. Imagine you’re earning style points like in GTA.
This was an elevated station
God damnit , now I gotta go watch police academy 1-765 now
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?
Some people think that if there’s a hwy lane closure in 30 miles, you’re the asshole of you don’t immediately merge over
I don’t mind personally, but don’t assume that your blinker means I HAVE to let you in
You do, though, depending on where you live. It’s the law in plenty of countries, and for good reason. Lanes are meant to be used until they end, and the best strategy with traffic is a zipper merge. Every-other car should be from the ending lane, assuming there are cars in the ending lane. If you aren’t letting the next person in to the continuing lane, you are an asshole, and a dangerous driver.
Definitely. I personally merge earlier, knowing it’s less efficient and will put me back relative to zipper merging - just to avoid the stress of trying to get in between potentially uncooperative mergees. But I also don’t get too mad at the mergers - maybe they’re in a legit hurry
and will put me back relative t
And everybody else in the lane.
If there’s a lot of traffic it makes sense to try and find room to merge early though
Only because of dumbasses who won’t let everyone zipper merge. If we could actually educate people on how to zipper merge, we wouldn’t need to pull off a heist to get out of an ending lane.
If only. But as things stand, I’d rather merge early than have to stop next to a moving lane. Less dangerous too than to try to merge from zero to however fast the other lane is going.
If there’s a lot of traffic it makes sense to try and find room to merge early though
Not at all. You destroy a smooth process where both lanes drive at the same speed. It turns into a stop and go in one lane while the other keeps getting filled with new cars from the back that join at the last moment.
“Early” being relative to the specific vehicles involved. Lorries/tractor-trailers need a LOT more time to find an opening before a merge than a “four-wheeler” does, for example.
Besides, it’s long been proven that “zipper merging” - which is basically waiting up to almost the last second to merge - is the more efficient method.
Nope. Waiting until the last second is not zipper merging.
I said “basically” to imply it was being stated in a simplistic manner for expediency. The article I linked to gave the full story, and I’d rather they read that along with proof it provided. You’re nit-picking, which isn’t surprising considering your other responses.
It’s more efficient if people let you pass in front of them. Which they might not
Not very efficient if you have to stop next to a moving lane lol
That’s a training issue more than anything else. People have never been taught how to merge well, and so inevitably everybody has their own “camp” when it comes to best practices. Those who complain about “fairness” typically have a more myopic view than those who take “the big picture” into account (or they have a faulty “big picture” in mind). I’ll grant that a good number of those “cheaters” are indeed just being selfish pricks, but statistics still show that zipper merging is best in the end. Far too many people care more about their illogical feelings than the facts, tho.
Zipper merging is ideal in certain situations but not all of them. It reduces the total “length” of traffic the choke point, but doesn’t necessarily increase the total throughout. It’s primarily meant to prevent traffic from backing up to other lights and intersections on the road. The throughput optimum for lighter traffic is to merge earlier (though not miles back) to maintain speed, and people who force their way in at the last second cause the standard “traffic wave” problems. That’s why it isn’t quite as clear cut as people make it - the optimum behavior is situational and that level of complexity is not well gasped by your average person who is profoundly uncurious of the world around them.
Then there’s the issue of people wanting to zipper merge in places where it is completely inappropriate because it blocks a travel lane. This was a weekly debate on our local subreddit when I was still using it. The number of people who insisted that a highway interchange should be treated as a zipper, despite that blocking the main road, is high enough that I am convinced that the zipper narrative has been a net negative. Though I also concede that most of these people would still be idiots about it without the plausible justification for bad behavior.
Zipper merges are always more efficient, though the problem is idiots don’t understand what they are. They are not racing up to the last moment you need to merge. Ever. They are never that. Ever.
They are ONLY two rules:
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If you need to merge, roughly match speeds with through-traffic once you’ve identified an opening, line up with that opening, and merge.
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If you’re in the through-lane, make room for roughly 1 to 1 cars to be able to merge in.
It is a whole different matter to occupy all of closing lanes or merge lanes. Solves a totally different problem. The people insisting it’s part of zipper merging are idiots that do not understand zipper merging.
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Came here to find this argument.
Well done everyone!
It always makes sense to merge at the last safe moment, but only if everyone else is doing that which requires everyone to trust each other and I can trust myself but I can’t trust any of you fuckers, etc.
Yeah, it would take a concerted, long-running campaign to reeducate drivers on the topic, as well as a nearly unified backing from those in a position to deliver it. Considering how political issues have been going downhill for so long that we’ve effectively sunk well past unheard of new lows, I’m not holding my breath on that one even though it really shouldn’t matter that much to them to be worth fighting over.
We all were supposed to be taught it in drivers ed.
The problem is most people are shit drivers who don’t know the law or the rules or even the guidelines.
I’d say a fair amount to have at least some idea that they’re doing things they really shouldn’t, but just DGAF. It feels like the majority of the populace have become significantly more selfish over the years, but will never admit that to themselves - let alone anyone else. It’s the dog-eat-dog mindset inching towards its inevitable end.
And some people think inflating numbers proves their point.
Plus, If you have 30 miles of signs telling you to get over and you wait until you are forced by the actual lane closure, yes you are the asshole.
I will not be taking questions.
If you have 30 miles of ending lane warnings, you should still ride it until the actual end. It’s best for congestion. Leaving a whole lane unused is pointless. It’s better for everyone if you wait to merge.
Pushing people to seek a detour is the only effective way of actually reducing the effects of a traffic jam.
We all zipper merged back when we were traveling close to full speed. We would continue through the closure at nearly full speed, except some jackass has decided to run up to the end and come to a complete stop before attempting to merge.
Now, we all have to zipper merge at 5mph instead of full speed, because some jackass couldn’t figure out how to do it at the right time.
Anybody who has played Factorio should be able to recognize the problem. If the lane is obstructed anywhere, the capacity of the roadway is the capacity of the remaining open lanes. Filling the closed lane before the obstruction maximizes the duration of the traffic jam.
Ideally, zipper merging should start immediately after the last exit before the obstruction. It should be used to push as many people as possible to exit and seek a detour. The lane should be effectively closed from the exit before to the exit after the obstruction.
No, this “solves the problem” in the same way that moving the baggage carousel further away from the gate reduces complaints. It isn’t actually improving traffic flow; it’s making people complain about it less.
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The article actually mentions zipper merging isn’t as effective at full speed.
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People utilizing the closing lane up to the end frees up space at the rear, which allows more people who can take advantage of an exit shortly beforehand to actually do so.
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Your stated ideal of closing the lane from the prior exit onwards isn’t practical if said exit isn’t within a reasonably short range. Never mind you’d definitely increase the number of people needlessly exiting and causing further problems on several other local roads, thereby expanding the impact rather than reducing it.
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Your premise also seems to be built upon the notion of stopped traffic rather than just a forced merging into fewer (or one) lanes where traffic still can flow reasonably well once past the merge point.
I’m assuming Factorio is a factory simulation, and that would involve mechanical & physical concerns, but that’s much more consistent than the wide variety of human responses and actions in such situations.
#1 is simply false. All merging is more effective at full speed.
#2 demonstrates a lack of comprehension. With the right lane closed ahead, the slowed traffic in the left lane indicates the effects of the obstruction ahead, and informs drivers that they should exit.
If the left lane isn’t backed up, the effects of the obstruction are not severe, and there is no need to exit.
Allowing both lanes to back up introduces the worst delay, and doubles the number of vehicles needlessly exposed to that delay.
#3 correctly identifies that the load is spread among more routes, but fails to comprehend that those other routes are normally underutilized and have considerable excess capacity available to ameliorate the problem. Diverting excess traffic to routes with excess capacity is a solution, not a problem.
#4, stopped traffic is inevitable with zipper merging immediately before the obstruction. Anyone with more than a million miles of highway experience can corroborate that assertion.
To prevent further troll responses, I’ve got an unexpected few minutes so I’ll try to reply.
- Once again you’re ignoring context. Zipper merging is not significantly more effective at reducing any sort of backup at full speed than other methods. You are essentially saying the same thing I did — whether you just weren’t keeping the full context in mind, or you treated it separately just so you could be argumentative is something only you can say.
- Once again, ignoring context. I was obviously referring to what those PAST the exit could do to help those behind them. The traffic is needlessly stopped by the inconsistent response to the merge - if both lanes kept going at a slightly reduced speed (mainly for safety) and spaced themselves appropriately in the leadup to the merge itself, then they could easily merge without stopping. Once again, you’re seemingly basing your argument upon the concept of a stoppage — the very thing zipper merging is designed to avoid.
- Wow, what a fucking assumption. Even if those other routes were that underutilized (exceedingly unlikely), they won’t be for long with the amount of traffic you’d quickly fill them with. They would likely be “underutilized” for a reason, or people would be using them - especially the locals would would actually benefit the most from taking that exit and who likely would already be doing so if it were normally more beneficial.
- It’s “inevitable” mainly because of the inconsistent response of those involved. Once the motoring public at large understands the method and utilizes it, the only way it doesn’t minimize the likelihood of a stoppage is if the roadway is at full capacity already - not impossible, but it’d be bad planning by traffic control to have required that merge at times when that would be the case, which is a different problem entirely.
Now, with this troll-induced (not you) response complete, I’m done with this.
3 was not much of an assumption. Roads are very rarely exposed to their peak capacity. 99.9% of the time they have substantial capacity to absorb excess traffic. Your assumption that they cannot is that 0.1%.
Once the motoring public at large understands the method and utilizes it, the only way it doesn’t minimize t
False. Patently false. The degree of control required to prevent stoppages is not available to individual drivers. To avoid hitting cones, drivers near the end of the closing lane have to make rapid changes in speed to ensure they are lined up for a zipper merge. That means hard braking, and that braking ripples through to everyone behind, in both lanes. Zipper merging is the root cause of stop and go traffic.
That hard braking isn’t required when zippering at the beginning of the closure, because there is no hard obstacle to hit in the open lane.
At best, this zipper-at-the-end method “works” not by achieving any traffic benefit, but by setting the expectation for other drivers behavior.
The alternative to zipper-late is “no passing in work zones”. Your position is established at the time you enter the zone; you have between that time and the obstruction to merge, but you may not pass someone in the adjacent lane. There is no longer any benefit to racing ahead to the end of the lane. The zipper merge occurs shortly after the lane closure.
The upside of zipper-late is that there are fewer opportunities to be pissed off at “cheaters”. It is psychologically better. It reduces road rage.
The downside of zipper-late is everything related to traffic. It introduces far more disruption. It needlessly turns free-flowing traffic into stop-and-go. It endangers workers at or near the closure.
“No passing” is objectively better for traffic before and during the closure. It increases speeds and thus throughput. But it also makes it easy for everyone to identify and be pissed at “cheaters”. Those cheaters induce road rage, so we can’t have the superior traffic method. Instead, we have to normalize cheating and tolerate worse traffic.
We tolerate slower baggage handling and longer walks through the terminal when they move the baggage carousel further away from the gate, but we complain much less when they do that. Zipper-late works much the same. It worsens traffic, but trains us to be more tolerant of worse traffic.
I actually have that 1MM+ as a professional driver - you’re wrong, but too stubborn to admit it. I’m too tired to bother arguing with you - especially since I’ve got some more of that same work to do in the morning. I’m done. Gnite.
lol You’re wrong and too stupid to understand, and too stupid to understand how bad a shitty appeal to authority is. Fucking sad.
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Some people eat up rage bait like a fine meal
Something something milk before cereal something…
That implies taking the time to appreciate its finer qualities. I’d say it’s more like feeding time at the trough.
