OK, here’s the piece I promised, about lane merging. Note: I don’t do this, because the social opprobrium would be overwhelming.
The situation I’m talking about isn’t merging onto freeways. (On freeways, one should whenever possible change lanes or slow down to allow the merging vehicle onto the highway. ) I’m talking about when there’s an unexpected obstruction in one lane of a multi-lane road or street, such as a stalled car, a moving van or construction.
Just for a minute, think of this situation as a traffic engineer might, viewing the pavement in each lane as “vehicle storage space.” If something up ahead is causing traffic to stop or slow dramatically, why should all the vehicles line up in one lane only? That just backs the tie-up even farther down the street. If both lanes were used, with each vehicle fairly and equitably alternating merging, once the obstruction was reached, it would cut in half the length of the clog on the street.
In reality, though, as so many previous comments have shown, people don’t act the way engineers view the world. We use our driving as a status quest. People want to be the cutters-off, not the cuttee. They think people who try to cut in front are greedy and ill-mannered. Sometimes, especially when the only vehicle zooming to the head of the formerly empty lane is a gas- and space-hogging Hummer, they are probably right.
Second, this is nothing I thought up in Boston. I noticed it some years back here in Charlotte. In Boston, in such a situation what they do is honk their horns. This is both useless and nuts. I mean, do they think the stalled car will, Lazarus-like, revive itself, or the moving van will decide to go away and come back at midnight, if only it hears some beeping horns?