There will also be type two drivers stuck in the queue lane who would actually quite like to get out and jump the pointless queue themselves. Depending on how freely the traffic is moving in the other lane, this can be a risky manoeuvre as they try to pull out into small gaps in traffic that’s moving much faster than they are.
You also have waverers in the freely moving lane who are having second thoughts. They’re getting pangs of guilt about queue jumping, so rather than continuing to the end of the lane for a nice zip-merge, they decide to try and pull in early. The indicator goes on and if there’s no gap forthcoming, they roll to a halt. Now the lane without a queue has got one, too.
Finally, in what I think is a newer trend, you have ‘type one’ drivers who take the self-righteousness to a new level and actually try to straddle both lanes. Their thinking, presumably, is that they can sit in the queue while simultaneously blocking the other lane and preventing the scourge of queue jumping. You couldn’t make it up.
This is just how we do it in the UK. Everyone gets to where they need to go a little bit more slowly and gets irate with everyone else in the process. It could be so much simpler and I’ve seen zip-merging doctrine followed religiously in other countries (predominantly Germany, as you would probably have guessed), but it seems to be an incredibly tough message to get across.
As another bank holiday weekend approaches and UK motorists look down the barrel of the usual chaos on the roads, there’s no doubt that more widespread adoption of zip-merging would help. It would be good to see more signage explicitly telling drivers the recommended course of action and better information from motoring organisations. This rant is my tiny contribution.
There might be different types of driver, but there’s one common aim for everyone on the roads – to get where they are going. With a bit of thought and zip-merging, we can all do it a little more easily.
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