The “Prescribed” Way to Merge

The Physics Problem

I’m a generally anxious person. This becomes very apparent when I am driving places, especially on long drives. When I first started driving, I was so nervous driving around in the parking lot that I was scared to go over 5 mph. Since then, I’ve clearly progressed, but I still am hesitant to drive over speed limit. Not merely because I will inevitably almost immediately get caught. The main reason for this, besides the fact that the higher the speed the more destructive the car crash, is that in my high school physics textbook there was a problem. In that problem, I was to calculate the speed limit for a road that had a curve that wouldn’t allow cars to fly off the road and roll over a cliff. While the writers of the textbook probably thought that this was a great real world problem for the readers to apply their knowledge, that’s all I can think about when I’m going around a turn at higher speeds. Before then, I had considered the fact that you could crash, but not rolling over a cliff.

Blind Spots

Switching lanes while driving is also stressful to a certain degree, because, as many know, cars have blind spots, where the driver can’t see them in the mirrors or out the windshield, but only through turning around and looking. Since I nearly always drive at or 5mph below the speed limit, because of the reason I mentioned earlier, most drivers are travelling considerably faster than me. So I can look in my rearview mirror, see a car plenty far back enough to switch lanes, check my blind spot, go to switch lanes, and send one more paranoid glace at the rearview mirror only to have them nearly at my bumper. These two problems are only worse in traffic, because there are more cars, in front of me, on my tail, because I’m traveling the speed limit, and coming up in the lane(s) beside me.

All the Negatives

So what do long drives have by default? High speeds, switching lanes, almost always traffic, and the thing that combines all of them, merging. The prescribed method is to yield to oncoming traffic and wait until there is room before merging onto the highway. If you try that method, like I have, you will find that in many cases you have to stop on the ramp. To a certain degree that is fine. Wait until there is a gap and then floor it. However, if someone is behind me when I attempt this, then generally they speed out around me, which leaves me unable to go or see. By then someone else has come and they do the same.

The Merging Olympics

Since the summer classes I am taking are 40 minutes away, the quickest way to get there is a highway by my house, during the time most people are commuting to work. So for the past four weeks, I’ve had to participate, in what I call, the Merging Olympics. I imagine I am a gymnast about to jump the vault. Sprinting down the runway, I leap onto the highway twisting every which way to try to see whether there are any cars coming and whether I need to go 80 mph in order to successfully merge onto the highway without stopping. Sometimes I’m lucky and it’s clear, but most times I end up going 70 mph on a 55 mph speed limit highway just to merge. Then I get to enjoy watching the people who were making it difficult for me to merge angrily speed out around me as I slow back down to 55. So I’ve given up trying to merge the prescribed way. It doesn’t work and they need to update the driving manuals so they don’t claim that an ineffective method not only works, but actually is the correct and legal way to merge.

A Positive Side?

Another thing that makes me anxious is being late. Therefore, the fact that this post is over 4 hours late isn’t very settling to say the least. I apologize for that. If it is any consolation, I feel like I just merged onto a three-lane mega-highway during rush hour going 80 mph, but I did it, and I didn’t die. So there’s that.

Notes:

* For those who don’t know blind spots are where the driver can’t see other cars in the mirrors or out the windshield, but only through turning around and looking.

Sources:

Image credit: "Approaching Chicago, Illinois, Kennedy Expressway, I-90 and I-94 Eastbound" by Ken Lund.