Merge Late ↦

Brandon Loomis, reporting in The Salt Lake Tribune about research by Tom Vanderbilt that merging late when faced with a lane closure is best:

But one day, as his wife sat shamed in the passenger seat, the New Yorker decided to stay in the far-left lane till the very end, zipping past the queue of crawling cars until the barricade ahead forced him over. Bothered by the glares he got the one time he decided to be selfish on that New Jersey highway, he decided to find out what was the “right” approach to the imminent ending of a lane.

Merge early, with all of the decent citizens who put the common good ahead of themselves?

Nope. It turns out, Vanderbilt found, that those selfish buzzards who fly past on your left and then slide into line at the last possible second are doing everyone a favor. His research took him to states such as Pennsylvania, where traffic flowed 15 percent better after transportation officials encouraged late merging through electronic signs. It’s better to use the highway’s full capacity by going to the end of a lane, he said.

I think it worth pointing out that if more people recognized how merging late benefits the overall traffic flow, the soon-to-be-closed lane wouldn’t be left empty and therefore using it wouldn’t seem so rude.