I am realizing that I don’t know everything.

For years, probably since I’ve been driving, I’ve assumed that the correct way to approach a lane-closed merge is to move over as quickly as possible to avoid a bottleneck at the actual merge point. Then I saw a news report on television about something called a “zipper merge.”

It caught my attention because I always got ticked when people try to wait until the last second to merge into the “main lane.” Apparently, folks like me have been mucking up the system, as it’s supposed to work. You AREN’T supposed to merge early, but you actually should change lanes at the point of the merge.

So, to all the people I’ve given dirty looks and created a rolling roadblock for, I’m sorry. I was wrong.

If you check ask.metafilter.com, I think Jacquilynne puts it best in this quote:

Assume the lines each have one hundred cars in them. If you shuffle merge at the last point, everything is even.

But you, being the eager beaver that you are, moved over somewhere a mile before that point. Now line 1 has 101 cars in it, and line 2 has only 99. Because you’ve been in the line for awhile, when you get to the front, you have to let someone from line 2 shuffle merge in front of you, meaning that two cars got over from 1 to 2 in the space where only one should have. Plus, though, the guy who let you in now has to let another person in. That’s three! Three cars where only one would otherwise have merged.

It doesn’t take a lot of early movers before lane 2 is emptying out faster than water bucket at the OK corral.

I’ve never heard anyone else give an argument FOR the zipper merge before this TV show. Where do people actually learn this? Was I asleep during that lesson of Driver’s Ed?