I mean, some people clearly want to do late merges, but I can't imagine why. It's like going a third of the speed limit on a highway on-ramp and then waiting at the bottom of an opening. The latencies, the narrow windows, etc., are all just awful and have really gnarly cascade effects that are not outliers, but common. Merging over when there's time and space, and when you're moving at speed, seems so much better. Now, if traffic is flowing freely and with adequate following distance to allow it, I can see how late merging would increase order and throughput, but you're also using up all your runway and increasing the chance of hitting the fallback case where you have to come to a total stop.
There is, it seems to me, an argument for consistency, though. Like, a mix of early merging and late merging can go worse than plain late merging; and as long as someone can late merge, they can worsen the situation overall, and also trigger everyone's happyfun responses to the feeling that someone else is cheating. So in that sense, there's some value in widely spreading that late merging is superior and normative, to reduce, say, road rage.
I think road rage is a real problem worth avoiding as much as travel times, though of course that's not the argument that's widely put forth. Today I had someone following me at a truly unsafe following distance who then wove around three other lanes of traffic because they were unhappy with me not speeding enough in the HOV/HOT lane. Recently I had someone follow me, including sudden turns in a parking lot and other losing-one's-tail strats, for about ten minutes.
Since we can't force people to be polite, nor easily short-circuit the rage people feel at impoliteness, it seems like there's a need to solve that problem. Which doesn't excuse misrepresenting the paltry science, but does challenge some my sense of what the social norms ought to be.
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I mean, some people clearly want to do late merges, but I can't imagine why. It's like going a third of the speed limit on a highway on-ramp and then waiting at the bottom of an opening. The latencies, the narrow windows, etc., are all just awful and have really gnarly cascade effects that are not outliers, but common. Merging over when there's time and space, and when you're moving at speed, seems so much better. Now, if traffic is flowing freely and with adequate following distance to allow it, I can see how late merging would increase order and throughput, but you're also using up all your runway and increasing the chance of hitting the fallback case where you have to come to a total stop.
There is, it seems to me, an argument for consistency, though. Like, a mix of early merging and late merging can go worse than plain late merging; and as long as someone can late merge, they can worsen the situation overall, and also trigger everyone's happyfun responses to the feeling that someone else is cheating. So in that sense, there's some value in widely spreading that late merging is superior and normative, to reduce, say, road rage.
I think road rage is a real problem worth avoiding as much as travel times, though of course that's not the argument that's widely put forth. Today I had someone following me at a truly unsafe following distance who then wove around three other lanes of traffic because they were unhappy with me not speeding enough in the HOV/HOT lane. Recently I had someone follow me, including sudden turns in a parking lot and other losing-one's-tail strats, for about ten minutes.
Since we can't force people to be polite, nor easily short-circuit the rage people feel at impoliteness, it seems like there's a need to solve that problem. Which doesn't excuse misrepresenting the paltry science, but does challenge some my sense of what the social norms ought to be.