If You Live In A City…
…and Austin is a city (#14 in the U.S., population-wise, at about 750,000, and continuing to grow by about 3% annually), and if you further live at least 10 miles from where you work, as I do, the biggest stress in your life is often traffic. Seriously. Oh, sure, we have bigger concerns – money, health, money, family, did I mention money? – but twice a day you have to subject yourself to an enormously stressful commute that can truly make you ill. Often, before I am a mile from my house in the mornings, I can feel a giant knot in my neck and growing anxiety in the pit of my stomach – and this before I make it to the highway!
What makes driving in a car, which can be, in certain environments, a relaxing part of the American dream, such a daily visit to the depths of Hell? In a word, idiots…the idiots that can’t drive, that behave in a manner of a complete a**hole when behind the wheel, in a manner that they would never dream of when they aren’t in their cars.
And nowhere is the frustration of the commute more accute then in a highway situation with multiple lanes that are bumper to bumper, and exit ramps and shoulders that are being used as if they were through lanes of the highway. Thus, after this long introduction that no doubt reveals far too much of my own psychological profile, I present The Urge To Merge, from this week’s NY Times Magazine, for those of you who also find far too much of your life draining away in these circumstances.
A taste, told from the perspective of a driver who is about to enter a tunnel where the number of lanes drops:
Two-thirds of us, according to calculations I have made while brooding inordinately about this inside my Subaru, are lineuppers, slowing rapidly from 70 to 30 or 20 or whatever and taking our places — courteously and patiently, as our mothers taught us to do, respecting the broad tenets of social justice and the primacy of fairness to all persons on the road, regardless of income or ethnicity or car model or perceived level of personal importance — where was I? Oh. Sorry. Taking our places at the end of the line, I was saying, the long two-lane line that has formed to the right, creeping toward the mouth of our tunnel bore. There is still some empty lane space beside us on the left, true, where the cones are gradually closing those left lanes down. But people are already lined up. If we passed them on the left to get in farther ahead, we would be cutting the line.
One third of us, on the other hand, zoom on by. For purposes of this problem, I shall call these sidezoomers…Sidezoomers have a variety of strategies…: there are the ones who zoom by a few dozen cars, angling in when they see a plausible opening; and there are the ones who zoom all the way up, to the very top of the cone-off funnel, at which point they thrust their aggressive little self-entitled fenders toward the lineup and nudge themselves in. And there are those who opt for frontage-road sidezooming, which requires maneuvering into the far-right highway lane in order to get off at a certain pretunnel exit that dumps cars onto a surface street…They zip along that street and get back on [the highway] at the next entrance, slipping in ahead of the bumper-to-bumper highway lineup they just bypassed. So now they’re cutting the line, too, but from the right.
And that very last exit lane before the tunnel, also on the right? You can’t get back onto the highway once you’ve exited there, but if you’re a sidezoomer you can slide into the empty exit-only lane, still on the highway but pretending you’re leaving, and then you drive and drive right past all the lineuppers until whoops, now at the last minute you’ve changed your mind and you’re not exiting at all; you’re sneaking back into the line.
Not in front of me, though.
The cold, hard truth about life, in a nutshell: two-thirds of us are nice people who could live happily ever after, 1/3 are jerks, and the jerks send the rest of us into an early grave.
Yeesh…and I thought politics was depressing!…
I take the Metro to work. I either read or take a little nap. It’s very relaxing.
See, we don’t have good mass transportation here (it’s Texas, after all, and the car – or rather, pickup – is king). You have to take the bus…if I had a rail option that would drop me off near work, I would take it…but now, the city is so built up that rail options, which are on the table, are projected to cost in the billions…
Yes, this is a major problem throughout the Southwest (which I’m tentatively putting Austin in for the sake of a point). LA, Phoenix, and most everywhere in Texas could really benefit from some legit rail options.
Even so, a LOT more people are taking the bus these days, with gas prices…and I might even consider it myself, if it was a direct route (more for stress relief than anything)…but I’d have to changes buses multiple times and all that jazz…
I’m definitely a lineupper. In fact, I’m a vigilante line-upper. Sixteen years of living in Manhattan has taught me how to keep unfairly merging traffic at bay. I’m very familiar with the Caldecott Tunnel (known locally as the Crawldecott) and I’m definitely a middle lane guy.
However, I have to confess that there is a certain amount of moral superiority which one feels when you don’t let drivers from the left cut you off. This guy’s a cheater and I’m not. My wife thinks I’m being a jerk and calls me a Boy Scout. As they say on sports television: you be the judge.
I’m right there with you…I MAY let you in, if you’re a linecutter, depending on the mood I’m in, but I certainly feel no obligation to. Your time is no more valuable than mine…
Well, you’re a nicer guy than I. I consider linecutters to be no better than people who run red lights, talk loudly on cellphones, or hassle you at the airport. I never let them in. I’m generally opposed to capital punishment, but these guys make me rethink my stance.
I had a very conservative professor in college who said that the decline in civility is one of the worst things plaguing us (and this was in the 1970’s — things have only gone downhill since). He argued that the state had the right to enforce civility. I think he has a point.
Yeah, but how do you enforce civility against linecutters? You’d have to have a cop at every exit ramp…actually, at least three or four, since the minute you pull one person over you’re out of play for a while…I’m afraid we’re stuck with them…
You just need one cop — all he has to do is shoot out the tires of the offending vehicles –
If they pulled people over for driving like an ass (wreckless driving) rather than pulling people over for going 40 in a 30, which is far less dangerous, maybe people wouldn’t cut in line. The thing is, people line-up wayyy too far back from where the lane should merge, which could cause traffic issues for miles, especially if there are sensors that cause the lights behind the merge area to go into a different routine. The “logic” some cities put into the lights is only “logic” insofar as the computer does what the idiots in charge of traffic flow told it to do.
If people would learn how to alternate effectively at the merge areas there wouldn’t be a great need to line up in a single line. That’s what’s frustrating to those of us, who on occasion “cut”. If traffic is backed up already, what’s the sense is making the string of cars twice as long? People just don’t know how to merge because it is not a skill they do well, hence the need to line up as quickly as possible. Same with people who get over in the fast lane two miles prior to actually making that left hand turn. It really isn’t much of a task to change lanes. Those same “uncivil” people that are changing lanes at the last minute will let you into their lane if you move over. They don’t want to hit you anymore than you want to hit them…oh, well, strike that. They don’t want to hit you…
Sorry, you linecutter, you, I’m not buying it. The whole reason the line is moving so slow is because you folks keep cutting into it. If every DID line up, the line would move fairly quickly…
Depends on which line you’re talking about. A lot of the time the line is backed up well beyond where people merge. So, at that point, it doesn’t really matter, the people are stopped regardless. Like I said, why have a line twice as long when you can have two lines and merge freely into the merged area? And, I don’t do it all the time, only when there isn’t adequate warning about what is going on ahead or when I can see something like a trucker that will be slow moving forward anyway. I don’t make people hit their brakes. That’s what causes issues, people hitting their brakes. People need to learn how to coast.