Group 1A (with lots of members, IME) will use the ramp to accelerate to about 5mph under the speed of right-lane traffic. They then merge and travel at their slower speed for a mile or so before accelerating to match the traffic flow. The disruption they cause is a lot lower than Groups 1 & 2, but it’s a mystery why, if you’re willing to travel at the same speed as others, you need to delay doing so.
If it’s a guy who stopped, this is acceptable. With a slow driver, this would be really dangerous - you’re expecting someone who is obviously marginally competent to deal not only with traffic in the right lane, but also with traffic coming from behind him.
You know what they say, move it or lose it.
I agree with hanging back. There’s a ramp in Belfast, Maine (Waldo Avenue and U.S. Route 1) that is fairly short; most drivers seem to slowly drive very slowly toward the end and often stop if there’s any traffic. If I suspect they aren’t going to merge properly, I’ll sit and wait close to the top of it, then gun it when they’re out of the way.
Fortunately, the ramp traffic is only merging onto a 45 mph (approximately 72 km/h) road.
There’s one of those in the Virginia suburbs of DC, where a major road merges onto a minor semi-freeway. There’s always a backup where drivers stop at the top of the on-ramp, because there’s no acceleration lane.
They also say that the overtaken vessel has the right of way.
Well. I look at it this way: if they are merging properly, there is no need for me to make adjustments to my speed.
If they aren’t getting up to speed, and I can move over, I will to make it easier on them, if not, then I will generally speed up to get ahead of them. If I can safely do neither, and they don’t look like they’re going to yield, I’ll sound the horn to make sure they notice me, and as a last resort, I’ll slow down to make space – not a good alternative, but better than hitting them.
I’ve seen some people here stop at the end even when everyone on the freeway already had moved to the left lane to let them in. That’s when you know they’re totally oblivious and not paying attention!:smack:
Yes, I meet some of them from time to time. They are certainly idiots, and I tend to just let them go on their merry way. “Go wreck your car far away from me,” is what I think. A fender-bender at 25 mph would be bad enough, I sure don’t want to crash doing 65!
In my area, we have a lot of on-ramps with “metering”: stop lights that allow one or two cars onto the freeway at a time. Major safety hazard, IMO, because of the problem getting up to speed to enter.
Around here, if you try to change lanes and use a turn signal, about 9 times out of 10, some crazed idiot (to put it VERY politely, I can’t use more accurate language outside the Pit) will deliberately speed up to cut you off from your lane change.
Yes, the turn signal as “Please, won’t you let me in?” is ineffective and even counter-productive. Best plan is to accept the burden of matching speed and finding acceptable slots yourself - turn signal thus becomes “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you.”
They do it any time they see a signal, whether you’re politely saying “I’d like to do this” or “hey, jackass, I’m MAKING this lane change”.
The problem is that some people are anxious about merging onto the highway. They think “What will happen if I get to the end of the onramp and no one will let me in? I might drive right off the road and die a fiery death! To be safe, I should drive very slowly while merging, so I can safely stop at the end and wait if necessary! What a safe driver I am!”
The result is that they creep along the onramp doing 50 mph, while no one passing by in the slow lane wants to slow down by 20 mph to let them in, and so they inevitably stop at the end of the lane and wait for the required huge gap in traffic to creep into.
What they fail to realize is that no one minds letting in another car in front of them that is going the same speed as them, or faster. If you think that some huge fraction of other drivers are jerks who will not let you in, or who are actively trying to “cut off” your lane change, it’s because you’re driving too slow and no one wants to hit the brakes and get stuck behind you. Speed up a little.
Close your eyes too. You don’t want to see if something bad is about to happen.
Where did I say I, or any other driver I’ve observed this being done to, was not matching speed? I didn’t. You chose to read that in to excuse dangerously aggressive stupidity.
In this area, you can be 10 or more car lengths in front of the car you’ll be in front of after a lane change, traveling at the same speed, signal that change, and that car will jam the gas to try to keep you from making that lane change.
Please tell me where, so I can avoid your location. I’d like to also avoid any locations where lots of people are those Group 1 or Group 2 morons!
Then you’re likely to learn the errors of your ways, unless you’re very lucky.
The most common class of moron that I see happen is in those cloverleaves where as I’m merging onto the freeway, if I stayed in my lane I’d exit. This Group 3 moron feels compelled to speed past me as I’m speeding up, so they can get in front of me to exit, and then jam on their brakes.
The worst ramps I remember were in downtown Detroit, where the entrance ramp simply angled onto the freeway, with no merge section at all, sort of a “merge or die” intersection. Of course, the traffic to merge into is bumper-to-bumper at 70 MPH or faster. That was a long time ago, and I suspect they’ve been replaced, since I don’t remember ever hitting these after the early 80’s.
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Here in NC, the interstates aren’t bad; the worst part of driving here is that the people responsible for street signs seem to get some kind of delight by putting them where you’ve already past the decision point by the time you can see and read them. This made me miss Michigan driving! Well, that and the fact that here in NC, nobody seems to know to treat treat intersections as 4-way stops when the traffic lights are out. Oh yeah, and don’t get me started on driving in snow or ice!
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Never took drivers ed, but I was told, “do not perform any actions that would cause other drivers to have to avoid you.” It is the person needing to merge that finds the gaps and does the correct speed to flow into one. I never expect the people on the freeway to do anything to help.
You can choose your slot and make your lane change in such a way that it’s not possible to cut you off - the would-be off-cutter can either acquiesce or rear-end you.
I think the metering lights are not quite that bad a problem because they are generally in operation only when traffic is very heavy (and hence, rather slow) on the highway.
One of my peeves is those on-ramps, off-ramps, or junctions where the on-ramp and the off-ramp cross (and NOT at nearly right angles). Lemme try to describe it, for those who don’t immediately get the picture:
You have an on-ramp, where people will drive on and need to merge onto the highway and then change lanes to the left. Very shortly after that, comes the off-ramp where people on the highway will change lanes to the right and then drive onto the off-ramp. (Get that? The off-ramp comes after the on-ramp!) These ramps are about 100 feet apart, with a right-most lane on the highway that serves them both.
So you have on-coming drivers merging into and across this piece of lane (right-to-left) simultaneously with off-going drivers merging into and across this lane (left-to-right). This is just a horrible venue of accidents waiting to happen.
My strategy: Get into, across, and out of this lane (either on-coming or off-going) as quickly and as early as possible in order to give other drivers the earliest chance to see what I’m going to do, and the most time to do their thing afterward. The worst drivers are the ones who dawdle for as long as possible before entering or leaving this piece of lane.
(I have no idea if I might be able to find a picture somewhere showing this kind of lane arrangement.)
Okay, I found a picture that I think shows a configuration like this, on the Hollywood Freeway (U.S. 101) in the vicinity of Ventura Blvd and Cahuenga Blvd.
Interesting observation on that article: This describes a formal scientific traffic study. It’s not a popularly-written news article. It suggests that the matter is improved by drivers cooperating with each other, and that in fact drivers often do cooperate with other drivers. Traffic modeling theories typically don’t include driver cooperation as a factor, and thus predict worse congestion problems than actually happens when drivers do cooperate. Whoda thunk it?
I loathe those.
I think that configuration was fairly common on a lot of cloverleaf interchanges. Having the acceleration lane serve also as a deceleration lane always seemed like a recipe for problems to me. For a better photo, check out Zoom Earth | Live Weather Map & Hurricane Tracker which shows the I-95 and I-395 cloverleaf in Bangor, Maine.
In my opinion, a better way to handle that would be to separate the merging and exiting traffic on a collector road that runs parallel. Kind of like what they do for some of the exits off of I-495 in Haverhill, Massachusetts.