Here's my SECOND idea for the day, which is to have a new highway safety campaign called, "Just Zip It" or "Zipper Up" or something along those lines. The idea would be to get Americans to adapt the European (or German, anyway) philosophy of merging which is (I think) that no one merges until the last minute, at which point, everyone takes turns.
I learned this the one time I was allowed to drive in Germany from somewhere else -- I think it was Hungary. After going really fast for a long time (I couldn't tell how fast because it was in kilometers, but I was told it was very fast) we came to some construction and we had to merge. I was driving this new yet still kind of shitty Mercedes, but the vehicle I was competing against was a big old and even more lumborous truck which nonetheless refused to yield to me. I was told shortly before impending impact by the nervous German beside me that it was because it was not my turn and the truck was not going to yield because it was *it's* turn. Anyway, that was an interesting experience. On the same drive we listened to this live Queen concern tape really loud, which I really hated.
So anyway, then Chris recently showed me this website on the science of traffic movement and the guy's thing about how one person can make a big difference in traffic patterns got me thinking that we shouldn't accept stressful and anxiety-ridden mergings, we should try to change them!
Combining social utopianism with car safety and sometimes crazy ideas has had a long tradition in my family. Maybe I'll tell you about my family's deep hatred of Volkswagons someday -- my father attacked my cousin's lime green Rabbit with a baseball bat one night when he'd been drinking and was feeling particularly psychotic (I think he attacked the TV the same night with the same instrument to prevent the CIA from spying on him). He liked to lecture me on how the Russian tanks had a superior design to the German tanks, which had been designed by Porsche, using little plastic models that I inherited to demonstrate (maybe I'll post a photo later when I figure out how to do that!) and this is part of what allowed the Russians to win the war or maybe just the battle of Stalingrad -- I forget. He also had a lot of crazy schemes about how we should all ride bicycles instead of driving, which don't seem so crazy now in Portland -- at least, not as obscure. The rest of my family has had a more rational love-hate relationship with cars, particularly Volkswagon; my grandparents liked referring to the "volkswagon wards," for instance, but my father was also an accomplished mechanic who did a lot of work on Volswagons -- but to my knowledge, my cousin was the only one to actually own one. Anyway, remind me to tell you the whole story sometime. There's more -- all about air cooled engines and other fun stuff!
(this doesn't have a spell check, does it?)
See, the thing is, I know rationally that merging at the last second is the most efficient thing to do. However, the context of merging (at least for me on my daily Greeley commute) is that a whole bunch of people are aware that the right-hand lane ends, so stack up in the left lane. Once they've done this (and I do this, I admit), there's this implicit "if you use the right-hand lane you're an asshole" situation -- since the presumption is, anyone in that lane is either not familiar with the road, or wants to get a jump on the rest of the traffic (hence: asshole).
So it's a tough one. I kinda think a national campaign to change driver's ed would work. We would say: these are the new rules of the road -- young drivers would start out with the new assumptions, and older drivers would figure it out due to the media blitz (and the radical new driving habits of the kids these days). It would take 20 years to ripple through society, but we might as well do it. As it is now, we have people getting mad and killing poodles.
;Chris
Yeah, but if I remember correctly, you learned that lesson the hard way, just outside of -- of all places -- the town of Dachau, where you quite reasonably rushed ahead to fill a gap in the zipper, thereby incurring the wrath and righteous disgust of every decent German on the road. (Filling gaps in zippers can often get you into heaps of trouble.) To make this idea fly in the land of the free and the home of the brave, you'd have to produce your highway safety commercial in 1950s-era grainy technicolor with two guys in thick black-framed glasses engaged in a senseless politeness contest in their identical Dodge Darts before finally realizing that the zipper is both the logical -- and the patriotic -- solution. A newspaper delivery boy happening by on his bicycle could be seen witnessing the procedure and filing it away in his memory for the day when "I'm as big as daddy." Daniel Stern (voice of The Wonder Years' Fred Savage character as an adult) could provide the voiceover narration. I better stop here.