Archive for August 12th, 2015|Daily archive page

Are We Merging Onto the Highway All Wrong?

In what seems like a past life now, about fifteen years ago, I owned a sort of loose copy of the iconic Lotus Seven, a fantastically unreliable mongrel with a Ford engine and a Toyota differential built in Africa by people who could lay down glass-smooth concours-quality paint without breaking a sweat but who couldn’t weld two beads without leaving a hole between them. My seating position in said vehicle put the top of my head below the beltline of a Camry or Accord. I was effectively invisible to anything taller than an MGB.

As a consequence, I learned in a hurry to make sure I always had an escape route on the freeway in case the driver of the vehicle next to me decided to make an unannounced change into what he or she no doubt saw as an empty spot. I also made it a habit to stay out of the merge lane, because the average American driver merges onto the freeway by looking dead straight ahead, accelerating to about ten miles per hour below the speed limit, and rolling down said merge lane until it ends, at which point he moves over without turning his head a millimeter in either direction.

My faux-Seven shared a driveway with a Land Rover Discovery. When I was behind the wheel of the Discovery and enjoying the unfettered self-righteousness of my late twenties I would often lurk right behind those uncaring mergers until they drifted in my direction. At that point I would blare the horn just to watch them experience a brief moment of full wakefulness behind the wheel, usually accompanied by a swerve towards the shoulder.

In being disinclined to get out of the way of merging traffic, I had the law on my side. Most states place the responsibility of merging solely on the traffic in the lane that is ending. Illinois is one of the few exceptions, and only with regards to freeway on-ramps, where the law of that state places a mutual responsibility on traffic in both lanes to adjust accordingly. You can look at it like this: Most states are like NASA and SCCA racing, where there are specific rules giving the right of way to one lane. But Illinois is like LeMons racing, where both lanes are expected to cooperate.

Then there’s Texas, which specifically allows merging traffic to drive on the shoulder after the lane, and to accelerate on that shoulder, if it’s necessary to secure a spot in traffic. My personal experience in Texas indicates that when this law is taken advantage of, it’s almost always taken advantage of by a lifted F-350 diesel with vertical exhaust pipes. And whatever rental car I’m taking to the racetrack at the time is almost always occupying the space they’d like to have.

The discrepancies in state law aside, I think that if you asked most people, and particularly most people who identify as “car guys,” they’d tell you that safely merging onto a freeway is the absolute and complete responsibility of the cars arriving from the on-ramp. Most of us have a particular loathing for drivers who aren’t paying attention, and the typical uncaring merger is the poster child for that sort of behavior. It’s frustrating to have to hit the brakes just because the idiot in the CUV coming onto the Interstate isn’t paying attention.

Yet the older I get, the more charitable I’m inclined to be towards those incompetent on-rampers. If you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize that merging onto a freeway is the most demanding task most drivers will ever face. They are accelerating up a hill into a situation that requires they look both ahead and behind them. Yeah, a competent operator can look well ahead, observe the position of every vehicle in the lane, and slot right in, but most people aren’t very good at looking ahead on the road. If you want an idea of how far most drivers look ahead on the road, wait until the next time you see a state trooper on the median and watch how late people are hitting their brakes. It’s rare to see them display more than forty or fifty feet of forward awareness.

So there you are, the untrained driver, trying to find a hole in traffic. You’re not good at quickly adjusting the position of your vehicle in any direction. When in doubt, you’ll do what you were told to do in Driver’s Ed: you’ll stomp on the brakes and reduce the speed of your merge even further into dangerous territory. If you try to brake and turn at the same time, you’re likely to activate your stability control, assuming you’re lucky enough to have it. It’s scary and miserable and it’s no wonder that I’ve seen plenty of cars just stopped dead at the end of on-ramps waiting for a thousand feet of clear space. That’s what happens when the driver simply can’t process the situation well enough to make it work any other way.

Compare that to what the average driver who is already in the right lane of the freeway is doing. He already has appropriate speed and therefore can more easily adjust that speed. He doesn’t need to change lanes at the same time. It’s enough to slow down a bit or, if possible, speed up a bit. That makes the hole for the merging driver and then they can both continue on their way.

Put aside your prejudices for a minute and just think of the brains of the merger and merge-ee as computers. Does it make sense to have one computer operating at redline while the other one is idle? Of course not. You want to allocate tasks so both computers are being used appropriately. That’s what happens when we ask drivers who are already on the freeway to assume more responsibility for safe merging.

As a “car guy,” as a trained driver, as maybe even an autocrosser or club racer, this idea doesn’t sit well with you, does it? You don’t have any trouble merging and you don’t see why you should have to adjust your behavior to help people who do. But that’s what being part of a society is all about: using some of your excess capacity to assist people who don’t have enough capacity themselves. If you do your best to make things easier for other drivers who are perhaps old, or sick, or operating imperfect vehicles, then perhaps someday, when you are in a similar jam, someone will look out for you. Take my advice, though: if you want drivers to look out for you, they have to be able to see you.

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