Whose space is it anyway?

A response to a post reminds me of another position occasion.

You are driving down the highway in the RH lane (because you only stay left to pass - right?). You come upon an entrance ramp and you see that 3 cars are looking to merge onto the highway. You also know that you will be right in the merge area when they will. What do you do? You have several options:

1. Slow down or speed up so that they can merge. I don't like either. If you slow down, they wil slow down and you don't change anything, and I hate to accelerate into a situation - you just reduce the time you have to react.

2. Move over into the left hand lane. What - that is the passing lane! Well, what are you doing? You are passing cars that are not yet up to speed. Here you allow the drivers a clear shot to merge.

Now this second choice has problems of it's own. If there is no one in the LH lane you are lucky; however, this is not likely. You are most likely going to have to merge yourself to move over. You should have been watching traffic so you know whether it is moving faster (usually) than you. In this case you will have to speed up. If you don't want to, it gets tricky. You need to slow down to let the car on the left pass you, then move over. At the same time you are slowing down, remember to keep a space so that if you can't get over, you still leave room for people to merge into your lane. Complicated? Yes, but if driving was easy, we should have no accidents and I would not have to write this blog .

Being able to let people in is an art form, and if done right it actually helps traffic move faster and smoother. It comes down to the basic rule - you should respect other people's space and they should respect yours. By trying to help others, you raise the Driving Intelligence of the road, a concept I will explain in the next post.