[steamer25]

Nice, patient guy but there's a better way yet if you can afford to gamble with your time a bit (don't try this if you can't afford to lose a little time).

When confronted with a single backed up lane, use the uncontended lanes to zip to the front of the wave and merge in _at speed_. Maintaining speed is important. If you don't find an opening, you'll have to abort and find another route to your destination.

The up-side is that this almost always pays off and you waste little time slowed by traffic or slowing others. The reason is because many people who queue up resign to the monotony and pull out their phone or their air drums, etc. They pay enough attention to brake consistently but not enough to accelerate as soon as is possible.

The vast majority of the time, you can slip in front of one of these 'sleepers' before they notice the opening or have fully accelerated. Because of inertia, they will go through an acceleration period where you pull away from them leaving them a very sufficient gap.

Another way to look at this is using the available real-estate to ascertain a proper zipper-merge. If done right, you wait less and no one gets stuck behind you. This is especially useful if you commute five days a week--the payoffs over time are well worth the occasional crap out.

[devin]

I take issue with your theories. The "payoffs" you allude to do not exist. Your "zipper-merge" costs you gas money, and if you took the time to watch the video, you'd realize that you are considered a "cheater". Cheaters feel better about having gotten in front, but what they don't realize is that the "sleeper" is providing a way for cars to merge, thus alleviating the jam in the first place. All you're doing is typical busy-body traffic maneuvers that soothe your rattled frame, but do nothing to actually get you to your final destination any faster. The difference between maintaining adequate distance and doing your patented "zipper-merge" have been proven to shave at the most, a minute and a half off of your commute. Even if you do this five days a week, you're saving roughly 8 minutes. If you think that's worth it, then you should also be aware that the vast majority of accidents occur while changing lanes.

[Dove]

Actually, this study (http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/wz/workshops/accessible/McCoy.htm) lends credence to the claim. Late merges have better throughput than early merges when encouraged by traffic signs and uniformly adopted.

The study does not directly address the effect of "cheating" late merges which can create waves, but did note that traffic signs which strongly encouraged early merging by everyone increased overall transit time through construction. That suggests that the default case is better.

That makes a little sense to me: a single lane can bear less traffic, so extending the amount of distance everyone has to spend in a single lane might result in higher latency overall, if not necessarily lower throughput.