Yep. Not only is stuffing yourself into denser traffic bad for throughput, it’s not a part of zipper merging.
It’s just something they’re taught because it can reduce the tail of congestion and can sometimes keep it from spreading to other roads. Bad teachers and idiots conflate it with zipper merging so that idiots like these commenters think it’s part of zipper merging and defend it.
Whereas actual zipper merging doesn’t give a shit where it happens. All it requires is that through-traffic gives roughly 1-1 room for merging traffic, and that merging traffic look for and take an opening.
If they were ACTUALLY practicing zipper merging, neither lane would let themselves condense past two vehicle lengths per vehicle, which obviously doesn’t happen when lane closures cause congestion.
People that glaze zipper merging are ignoring that the real issue is the bottleneck caused by the lane reduction.
Yep. Not only is stuffing yourself into denser traffic bad for throughput, it’s not a part of zipper merging.
It’s just something they’re taught because it can reduce the tail of congestion and can sometimes keep it from spreading to other roads. Bad teachers and idiots conflate it with zipper merging so that idiots like these commenters think it’s part of zipper merging and defend it.
Whereas actual zipper merging doesn’t give a shit where it happens. All it requires is that through-traffic gives roughly 1-1 room for merging traffic, and that merging traffic look for and take an opening.
If they were ACTUALLY practicing zipper merging, neither lane would let themselves condense past two vehicle lengths per vehicle, which obviously doesn’t happen when lane closures cause congestion.