Atwood, Robert C wrote:
I disagree. Both of these situations shown fall into the latter
category, the difference is the degree of spacing between the cars
during the merge.
You've got cause and effect confused. The cause of the jam is not
having enough space between cars for them all to merge when appropriate.
The symptom of correct behavior (more space) is that all the vehicles
can travel at a higher speed. The symptom of higher speed is the need
to merge earlier so you don't collide with the "end of lane" marker (or
flip your car trying to move sideways too quickly at speed).
Neither of these show 'most people merging early but a few using the
open lane and tryign to merge late', i.e. the situation described to
launch this thread.
The reason those people would not be able to merge late is that the lane
into which they'd like to merge doesn't have openings large enough to
merge into. The symptom of that is that they get up there and must
stop. Now the two lanes are moving at different speeds, and it takes an
even larger gap into which the stopped car may accelerate and merge.
The linked articles are all about poor driving choices that lead to
positive feedback loops. The situation you're talking about is one such
feedback loop which (like many others) is caused by not leaving a large
enough following distance between vehicles.
I apologize to everyone on this list for having let myself get sucked
into this troll. I won't post on this thread again.
-Dale