[robmaister]

I've found that a lot of times it's not an onramp merging into you, it's people waiting until the last second to merge to an offramp and slamming on the brakes and/or cutting off someone to not miss the exit.

I deal with this every day when I come home from work on my exit off the 405. People don't want to wait in line because it's slow, but it's slow because those people cut in at the last second and cause the entire lane to apply the brakes.

The 405/55 interchange is another example of that, particularly 405N to 55N in the evenings.

[ikeyany]

You are absolutely correct. In my experience, traffic is caused by drivers who 1) refuse to plan ahead and 2) are fine with fucking over other people in an effort to mitigate that lack of planning ahead.

[drewg123]

You're being generous by saying they "refuse to plan ahead". I think they are actively planning to "cheat" and cut in line, thus screwing over all traffic behind them.

I deal with a merge every day where 3 interstates come together. The first two (I64E, I195N) run together for 1/2 mile and finally merge from 2 lanes to one just before they merge into a dedicated lane on the destination interstate (I95N). They recently (last year or so) added the dedicated merge lane on I95N to try to speed things up, but it has not helped. The real problem is people waiting until the last second to merge 2:1 for the merge on to the destination highway.

I think things would be more effective if traffic from both interstates were forced to merge to a single lane as early as possible. Then traffic would be moving at close to the speed of the destination highway, rather than at 5mph due to all the lane jockeying resulting from the 2:1 merge just before the final merge onto I95N.