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Donating forks to the dining hall

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Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#171

Post by practicemaths »

master-lincoln wrote: post #163
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everyone will get in the right lane for ten miles. And have 10 miles to get up to speed. As opposed to the zipper merge where everyone waits til the last minute, and everyone has to come to a complete stop. Supposing of course your observations are true. From what I can tell with the "lane closed in 10 miles", is some asshole invariably sees it as a chance to get ahead of everyone else, zooms through the left lane,…

In my experience there is no full stop if zipper merge is done right, but lots of angry people and a an inefficient use of the road leading to traffic jam miles before the merge needs to happen if people try to get into the one lane early. If people all zip merge, there is no zooming possible on the closed lane and both lanes that merge get down to around 20mph at the choke point. This only works in countries with ci…

So that sounds like a massive flaw in traffic management design.

It's more efficient to develop traffic rules that work in how people are not how they should ideally be.

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#172

Post by incanus77 »

sircastor wrote: post #159
incanus77 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrast that with Oregon, where everyone will stay in both lanes until one car length short of ten miles.

This is a pet peeve of mine, but also isn't it the most practical? Don't we want the lanes consumed as much as possible so traffic disruptions aren't distributed further back down the road?

Growing up learning to drive on the East Coast, my intuition finds a sweet spot between the two, typically merging while moving slowly when there is a natural gap between cars.

What I tend to see instead is hard braking ripple back down the line to a half-dozen cars or more for each car trying to merge right at the end because suddenly there are two cars right next to each other and one lane of car width left. Every time it appears that the lane-ending driver is like "oh wow, my lane went away!"

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#173

Post by CrispyKerosene »

master-lincoln wrote: post #163
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everyone will get in the right lane for ten miles. And have 10 miles to get up to speed. As opposed to the zipper merge where everyone waits til the last minute, and everyone has to come to a complete stop. Supposing of course your observations are true. From what I can tell with the "lane closed in 10 miles", is some asshole invariably sees it as a chance to get ahead of everyone else, zooms through the left lane,…

In my experience there is no full stop if zipper merge is done right, but lots of angry people and a an inefficient use of the road leading to traffic jam miles before the merge needs to happen if people try to get into the one lane early. If people all zip merge, there is no zooming possible on the closed lane and both lanes that merge get down to around 20mph at the choke point. This only works in countries with ci…

Even odder when it comes to behavior, in my experience people in my current city routinely fail at navigating a zipper merge without significantly reducing their speed, even coming to a full stop.

But when it comes to freeway on ramps, even in busy interchanges, there s usually no issues, which is odd because they are more or less the same maneuver.

There must be some psychological factors at play.

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#174

Post by CrispyKerosene »

practicemaths wrote: post #171
master-lincoln wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience there is no full stop if zipper merge is done right, but lots of angry people and a an inefficient use of the road leading to traffic jam miles before the merge needs to happen if people try to get into the one lane early. If people all zip merge, there is no zooming possible on the closed lane and both lanes that merge get down to around 20mph at the choke point. This only works in countries with ci…

So that sounds like a massive flaw in traffic management design. It's more efficient to develop traffic rules that work in how people are not how they should ideally be.

Brawndo! it's what plants crave.

Where do you draw the line though when catering to the uniformed? There is a reason we hire SME's.

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#175

Post by CrispyKerosene »

cjs_ac wrote: post #97

My first teaching job was at an old, prestigious boys' boarding school in Australia. (When I say old , it was old for Australia.) Every boy, whether a boarder or day-boy, and every staff member received a hot lunch in the dining halls each day. There were two dining halls: most of the boys at in the less ornate one, but the oldest boys and the staff ate in the more formal dining hall. Portraits of all the previous he…

Kings? I always wanted to explore those extensive grounds when ever drove along Pennant Hills Road. Unfortunately i was a poor.

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#176

Post by LegitShady »

marssaxman wrote: post #47

I love this spirit. In the office where I work, the main door locks whenever it closes, so the first person to arrive each morning props the door open for everyone else. Well, a new tenant moved in to one of the other units, and they started taking our doorstop. Morning after morning we had to go find it and retrieve it, for weeks! One day it occurred to me that I didn't have to complain to management, or get mainten…

I lived in a building where after a security event all the electromagnetic door holders for some reason were disabled and all the doors defaulted to closed. One of the other people who lived there decided that opening the doors (not locked, by the way, just closed) was too annoying and cut up a 2x4 into a bunch of doorstops.

I had to remove the door stops that kept being put into the secure entrance ways as well as actual fire doors required (normally open but magnetically released when fire alarm goes off) to keep to fire code. The guy making doorstops was angry with me (I didn't hide my removing the doorstops) until I explained that we'd had multiple cases of people wandering off the streets stealing mail and one guy actually took a fire extinguisher and sprayed the lobby, damaging cars in the parking level, and that keeping a fire door propped open and unable to close in the case of fire could potentially kill someone as well as open him up to liability.

If he wanted to keep the doors open as they were previously he needed to take it up with the building and get the electromagnetic door holders reset.

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#177

Post by jstanley »

practicemaths wrote: post #169
myko wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ugh tell that to the idiots who give me the finger for zipper merging in Columbus, OH

Well if you're forcing them to break when you merge then that kind of requires a finger imo. Regardless Columbus has a great lack of turn signals and understanding of basic intersection rules.

You're not forced to brake if you can see that 2 lanes go down to 1 and you therefore anticipate that the cars in the other lane are going to have to merge into your lane and you leave a gap to allow them to do so.

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#179

Post by aidenn0 »

master-lincoln wrote: post #158
myko wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ugh tell that to the idiots who give me the finger for zipper merging in Columbus, OH

What's the legal situation? Where I live in the EU merging lanes demands a zipper merge according to law.

Varies from state to state since traffic laws are per-state in the US, but in most states the traffic merging is supposed to yield to the traffic staying in their lane.

You also are supposed to maintain a "safe distance" (where the law might be literally "safe distance" or might give a specific units) which at freeway speeds would mean leaving enough room for zippers but I don't know anyone who has ever been cited for following too closely, except after an accident caused by following too closely.

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#180

Post by aidenn0 »

sircastor wrote: post #156
Jun8 wrote: post #137

There's a common pattern in population dynamics that I've observed, which probably has a formal name: A given system with (to simplify) two types of behavior: good and bad will tolerate and self correct up to certain percentage of bad actors (call this the jerk threshold, JT) after which all participants switch to the bad behavior. Examples are line formation for a service, cutting people off in traffic, stealing fro…

The thing that really bothers me about this is that the Jerk Threshold pushes the Overton window on Jerkiness - now if you're not participating in Jerk behavior you're disrupting "The way things work" which on its own might be jerk behavior. I grew up and live in Oregon. I've generally thought of our drivers as relatively non-aggressive. But I've seen Californians † who are aggressively merging and weaving (And if yo…

The population of California drivers seems to have this weird bimodality of weaving lanes or never changing lanes at all; the other annoying "California Driver" thing is "If you are going slower than I want, how dare you believe that I might move left one lane to pass you. I'll only do that after tailgating you for a few minutes and then flipping you off"

Even when going 65 in the right lane I've seen this happen.

The other thing that seems more specific to SoCal that pisses me off is: "35MPH is a perfectly reasonable speed to merge onto the freeway at. Not just on short ramps, but on ramps that are 1/4 a mile downhill where even a Geo Metro could hit 55. Yes I'm going to go 80MPH eventually, but not until a half mile after merging."

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