I moved to the east bay in the San Francisco bay area, but work on the other side of the bay bridge. The vast majority of the time, I take mass transit, but several times a month for unavoidable reasons, I have to drive across the bay bridge. For what it’s worth, I’m commuting with a baby in the car, so time is a factor!
Here is the setup. There is a “fast track” lane on the right side. There are, apparently, two types of drivers who use fast track:
Good people/suckers - we line up into the fast track lane at the earliest opportunity and wait our turn. Estimating about 40% of drivers.
Bad people/lane bombers/superior commuters - they take the cash only lanes (which back up further along, but are much faster earlier on) until the last second, and then slip in front of the people who have been waiting their turn. About 60% of drivers.
The problem I’m seeing is that there is absolutely no incentive, other than a sense of moral superiority, to be in category 1. Every day, every single person in category 2 is able commute much, much faster than I do by being in category 1. From the time I get in the lane to the time I get past the lane bombers, it’s often somewhere around 30 minutes that the category 2 people are saving (and passing on the the category 1 people). Category 1 people often try to keep out the category 2 people, but it’s a lost cause; you can tell the people who are new to the commute by this, ultimately, pointless behavior as there is really no way to keep them from squeezing in. On any given day, somewhere around 10 cars will manage to get in front of me despite efforts to keep them out. Efforts that fall short of being dangerous.
Convince me it is worthwhile to continue to be a good person!
Found this image. I’m talking about the top of the image “protected fast track”. All solid lines where this is all going down. The brief area of dotted lines is where you are supposed to head over toward the fast track (and where I do so).
Until there are cops out there to corral them to the right where 5-6 dedicated ‘Reckless Driving’ ticket writers are waiting to write them up (and maybe 5-6 fast pursuit chase cars with wooden ram-bumpers are lined up to smack their kill switches if they try to run),
there isn’t a lot you can do but curse & vent.
Please forgive the hijack, but I’m not getting something. The “fast track” is one of the electronic things you have in your car that debits an account as you pass a sensor, right?
Its been ages since I’ve been on the Bay Bridge, but I’m having a problem seeing how the lane that should allow people to move through quite quickly ends up having a longer line, which encourages people to cut in front…
I don’t think that’s an official term, just whatever the quora responder labeled it. But it is a solid fasttrack lane that the signs leading into it clearly intend one to enter early and not late.
You can see the issue from the picture. The fast track lane is congested early, but spreads late. While, the non fast track lane is spread early, but congested late. So, the solution is to use the non fast track lane until the last moment and then switch into the fast track lane.
If everyone did as intended, the fast track lane would move smoothly. It gets congested because everyone from the left is trying to squeeze into one lane at the last minute.
Before I retired the traffic reports would frequently say that the FastTrak lanes were slower. Now I know why.
This crap is common throughout the Bay Area. On 880 North people would get on the Mission exit only lanes and then cut into the through lanes at the last minute. The frustrating thing is that idiots let them.
On the Dumbarton bridge people would use the carpool lane to cheat until the last second, until they put up poles preventing last minute cut overs. That is what they need to do for the Bay Bridge.
They put up plastic poles, and the poles lasted one week before they were all gone from people driving through them.
Also, yes, my OP didn’t even mention all the people who are heading all the way right into the HOV lane who shouldn’t be there. Since I only have one kid in the car, and the HOV is for three or more, this is not an option either.
Is it really 30 minutes that are saved by cutting over? The perception of time can be hard to gauge in traffic because it is so frustrating to be stuck behind someone slow, or to see someone breaking the rules when you aren’t. I’m a relatively patient person, but I’ve gotten upset about big terrible slowdowns in traffic that really were only a few minutes.
If it really is a 30 minute difference if you cut over, and the likelihood of getting in trouble is low, and the likelihood of getting into an accident when you cut over is relatively low, I would probably become a lane bomber and keep doing that until they put up concrete barrier or otherwise changed things.
30 is low to average. It’s been as much as 90. And it’s, maybe, half a mile total. The whole drive door to door is 13 miles, and takes about 75 minutes average (up to 2.5 hours) with the vast majority of it being just this one part; once on the bridge it’s generally not too bad. The few times it’s taken less than an hour is solely because, inexplicably, there wasn’t much traffic at this one spot. And 90% of it is due to the dive bombers creating a merge where there is no merge. It isn’t even just the single lane to the left, it’s the three lanes to the left all merging over to sneak into the fast track lane.
I could get over it and convince myself that considering how poorly this is designed, I’m only currently doing the right thing in order to smugly look down on others.
Oh yeah, the Bay Bridge toll plaza is a clusterfuck. Honestly, I think what annoys me more are the people who crawl through the Fasttrak readers at 2 MPH, when you can actually drive through them pretty fast. But I digress.
I wouldn’t intentionally cut into a Fasttrak lane because it’s a douche move, but think about it this way too: It may save a couple of minutes, but it’s safer to stay in your lane than to play a game of merging chicken every day. I mean, I personally don’t care if I die, because that’s pretty much the only way my work will let me take a day off, but you’ve got a kid!
