Yes. If people are constantly moving into your appropriate head way this is doubtless annoying but the correct response is allow yourself to decelerate slowly to re-open that space again, repeat as many times as necessary, even if it means a bunch of agros end up in front of you. Better for them to be in front where you can see them, than behind or to the side, were you can't.
Yah. There's something that feels unjust about it -- the perception that the people cutting are getting something over on you -- that causes us to want to behave badly.
But even if 2 dozen people go around you and creep into that following space, you've been cost like 45 seconds at worst. Better not to play the game.
Also, it really doesn't happen that often. I'm that guy following at 3 or 4 car lengths in rush hour traffic and people aren't constantly funneling in front of me. It's a hypothetical "problem" that is bigger in your head than in reality.
Sometimes I think it's just people's reflexive scarcity mindset that tells them "that spot must not be that desirable or someone would be in it."
Regarding the broader topic of hitting your brakes, I find that I can commute 20 miles in stop and go traffic and only tap my brakes a couple of times. Helps to pace yourself behind the car 3 cars ahead of you instead of the guy right in front of you.
Society would have a lot fewer car accidents if we, collectively, could get over that "Oh no someone dared to get in front of me!" feeling.
We'd also avoid a lot of accidents if we stopped the people that are doing lane changes for position-jockeying and no other purpose.
So it's bad to be mad while driving, but there's a lot of lane changes that deserve the ire. (It's a tiny fraction of drivers that get really bad, but a less tiny fraction of lane changes.)
Being angry at them won't change their behaviour, but will make you more stressed. Remember: driving like that is its own punishment, because they'll be extremely angry and frustrated at everything. Between that and the realisation that driving 2% slower adds about 1 minute more per hour of driving you have to do, I find I can avoid stressing at people lane weaving and have a nicer journey myself.
> Being angry at them won't change their behaviour
Yes, but the comment above was about society collectively making a decision, so that's the context I responded in.
And while it's relaxing to not worry about your own exact speed, I don't see how that lets you avoid stressing about the people that are lane-weaving. They're acting dangerously and I need to be ready to react to them.
Unless they careened into your vehicle while making the lane change, just calmly allow your vehicle to drift away from theirs until you have a safe buffer again, and take joy in the fact that it didn’t meaningfully impact your arrival time, but you’ve meaningfully impacted the safety of your immediate surroundings.
How about you let the police do the enforcement, and focus on your own driving?
They are likely getting more frequent brake pad replacements.
Not a significant cost. But they sure as shit aren't getting what they think they're getting. Meaningfully farther ahead.
I now see it all as a risk assessment rather than as ritualistic combat.
If you added a missile launcher to your vehicle, it could become ritualistic combat again.
I try to maintain a constant speed in traffic, even if other people are speeding up and slamming on the brakes around me. Something like the average speed of traffic. Slamming on the pedals isn’t going to get you there faster.
Even if I do need to brake, speeding up more slowly also usually means I have more buffer time to slow down too.
This algorithm is garbage because it puts no value upon the danger cause by other traffic changing lanes when they would not have otherwise.
You're just going to wind up being approximately the slowest person on the road, which is fine if you're constantly trying to go slower to build space but this means that a bunch of traffic that would have not gone around you will do so. This ups the danger vs a steady flow less all these lane changes because every "thing" other people do is an opportunity to do it badly.
Kinda ironic when you consider that TFA was about detecting dangerous merge situations in the data.