Traffic will move faster if you 'cheat' and merge late at a bottleneck: study

We all experienced this situation - due to construction and obstacles, or simply a decrease in the front lane, all the vehicles were forced to slow down and eliminate the bottleneck. Too bad

In fact, a new study published by the Canadian Automobile Association (CAA) on Wednesday indicated that the bottleneck is the biggest cause of road delay. Bottlenecks stop more people, do not crash, bad weather and construction

CAA spokeswoman for publicity, Jeff Walker said in a statement, "Bottlenecks affected Canadians in all major city markets, commuting time increased by 50%." Saving millions of dollars in fuel costs and cutting greenhouse gas emissions will help Canada to commit to climate change. "

However, how to overcome the bottleneck at the fastest is a hot debate. Is it better to merge in the last second or try to break into it secretly? People in the latter camp are often called "fraudsters." Because they are trying to prevent people who are annexed at once (line stakeholders) from watching and unable to merge with others.

So what is the best way? Another study published on Wednesday indicated that this is a liar and a liar. This is from the Alberta Automobile Association (AMA).

Jeff Kasbrick, vice president of relations between the AMA government and stakeholders, said in a statement: "But if you ask traffic experts, they will tell you that the best way is to bring everyone a benefit: a zipper merger."

This means switching the vehicle to a continuous lane in a "zipper" fashion after using two lanes as long as possible.

"Research has indicated that this approach reduces congestion by up to 40%, decreases the speed difference between lanes, and improves fairness for all lanes traveling at the same speed," the report says I will. "In other words," fraud "and delay in merger is a good thing. However, it is limited only when everyone follows zipper. "

Kasbrick said that if the traffic is not being backed up, it will be merged in advance, but if the traffic is heavy, we will use a zipper ordered after using two lanes.

The most serious 20 bottlenecks in Canada are Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Quebec City. In the worst case, highway 401 and highway 401 between Toronto's Young Street.

When the traffic gets congested and slowly passes through the bottleneck, the zipper combines best. If traffic flows freely, early integration is the right approach. In this case it will help to merge as soon as possible to maintain free flow of traffic. As mentioned earlier, drivers waiting until the last minute often need to slow down or stop the merge. After that someone in the channel stops or decelerates them to merge them and then stops or decelerates the back person, which causes traffic congestion and rear collision. With early integration, drivers can find and enter traffic gaps and other drivers can fine-tune the interval to maintain traffic flow while maintaining speed.

Since the car changes into a lane in the same way that zipper's teeth gather, the maneuver is called late merge, or zipper merge. In this work, experts will reduce traffic congestion and drivers' frustration by stopping at a lane where closely-crowded late cars are closed and then running a car to another lane at the confluence point It helps. Christie Erickson, a workspace engineer at the Kansas State Transportation Authority, said in an e-mail that "officials are often seeing significant differences in traffic speeds in the workplace (mostly within lanes, adjacent roads)." Speed) Lane and anger of road (rude gesture, resolution of gap, lane blocking)

The main purpose of Late Merge developed by PennDOT is to reduce road storms during early and late mergers by notifying the drivers so that traffic can travel to the junction of two lanes. Although this is not a standard practice, Late Mergeis is often used in the highway work area of ​​the PennDOT regional office. That does not matter, it seems to be very popular with drivers. As a result of examining the operation result, it was found that the capacity of integrated operation increased by 15% (Footnote 5).