> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.thefrictionlog.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# I waited in that line for a mile and they all drove past me and cut in at the cone
- URL: https://www.thefrictionlog.com/08510/
- Published: 2026-10-19T21:11:01.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-19T21:11:01.000Z
- Description: Filed: the 1980s · Patched · the zipper merge, where signed
- Author: The Clerk
- Tags: Patched

*Forty minutes of brake lights. Then a pickup coasted right up the empty lane.* — Commuter, 2018

The driver who rolled past you was doing what state highway departments ask. Pennsylvania's department developed the method: use both lanes up to the merge point, then take turns. Merge early and the closing lane sits empty while the line grows. The catch is that most drivers would rather merge early, and many call the late ones line-cutters. You waited a mile out of good manners. The department didn't ask for that.

**For now**: in heavy, slow traffic, stay in your lane to the merge point and take turns; at highway speed with no backup, merge early.

### The full file

Engineers used to say the opposite. A freeway simulation paper from the early 1980s, by Zoltan Nemeth and Nagui Rouphail, built its model partly on a survey of 229 drivers and came out in favor of merging early once traffic got heavy. It also suggested keeping drivers out of the closing lane. Then the other view caught on.

In Minnesota, drivers did it on their own. On a stretch of I-35 that jammed only on weekends, the signs said to use both lanes during backups, and drivers began merging late. The state later built signs that switch on when traffic slows. Its own 2008 report said travel time through the work zones came out about the same, with shorter backups and safer merging. It calls taking turns plain Minnesota Nice.

North Carolina's transportation department decided it couldn't talk drivers out of merging late. That would cost road capacity, and it was close to impossible to stop anyway. So in 2016 it put up zipper signs at three sites. A Kentucky test on I-275 in 2015 found no statistically significant change in queue time or length, and two crash reports blamed confusion about the zipper merge.

Signs help. After that it comes down to whether the driver behind you has read one.