I think it's fixable, but only at great expense.

I have no science behind this, but I've driven in enough places to notice that there are broad cultural differences in how people drive. I don't think the difference is just in the people. It's also in the civil engineering.

For example, some places are very consistent about having nice long on-ramps that give drivers plenty of time to negotiate a merge without too much hassle, and entrances and exits are always placed on the right-hand side. My impression has been that these cities tend to have very sane drivers. Fewer traffic jams, too.

Others have exits and onramps on both sides. The ramps are often short, and you might even have the occasional short ramp with a tight curve that forces drivers to enter the highway 15-20MPH below the speed limit. These cities force a number of perverse behaviors that make driving problematic. It gets slow drivers out of the right lane because that lane is downright frantic. It also actively places drivers who prefer to drive at wildly varying speeds in the left lane, so now you've got people trying to find their place from both sides of the road at the same time. These combine to encourage a lot of passing on the right, which further mixes drivers who like to go at different speeds across all the lanes. And all that jockeying begets further jockeying, since one starts to feel like they have to drive aggressively just to hold their own.

Against that kind of backdrop, which seems to be the way American cities actually prefer to arrange themselves, I do think that no amount of education or public awareness could ever fix it. You can't create an environment that actively punishes people for behaving how you want them to, and expect them to behave that way anyway.

I find that simply following proper protocol in traffic rubs off on other drivers. It seems that way anyway. I don't think it's that hopeless. I think most "public awareness" initiatives are pretty hopeless, but my own experience leads me to think that this is tractable. People can learn new mental cost models.

I have personally witnessed the basics of this taught as part of a driver safety course, and most of the people who took the course at least made noises like they were surprised at some of the more intuition-challenging aspects.

I wonder what would happen if the National Ad Council just started producing billboards that said things like "LEAVE FOLLOWING DISTANCE FOR FASTER TRAFFIC" and "ZIPPER MERGE IS MOST EFFICIENT".

My hypothesis is that the problem becomes worse by at least a few other's impatience and greed. There might be some educated individuals on the road who try their best to do what's said to lead to better traffic conditions, but its the few that ruin it in the end. A tragedy of the commons.

No way, the checked-out drivers cause a ton more problems than aggressive drivers. If all drivers properly sorted themselves by desired speed from left to right we'd have much more efficient highways.

I'd also make the argument that the people who stubbornly don't get out of the way of tailgaters are at fault for creating slow road conditions, and share the blame for a dangerous driving situation. If someone behind you wants to go faster, get the fuck out of the way. And it's not even my preference-- in WA and OR it's literally the law that slower traffic should move right, but I've never heard of anyone being ticketed for it.

Hey, if you're being tailgated you're by definition not slower traffic.

Dumb people tailing and trying to go that extra 5mph are as much to blame for the danger as the people that don't get out of the way. And since they will be constantly forcing people to switch lanes, the outcome is the same except some idiot got their way.

So no.

Yep. It's the tragedy of the commons, or some such game theory problem. If you leave a gap, someone switches lanes to fill it. Then you back off to make a new gap (as do they, if they switched lanes with only a few feet in front of them), at which point someone switches lanes.

I still do it, because on average I can keep a good gap in front of me, but I have a feeling that's a big part of why it seems like nobody does it.

I don't think it's even a game theory problem, because most of the actors aren't even rationally looking at their options.

In the Pacific Northwest, maybe 20% of drivers are trying to make any decision that will help them. Maybe another 20% are trying to do the best for themselves as long as it doesn't harm the global traffic state. The last 60% are checked out and are barely paying enough attention to not crash.

Using PNW drivers as an example is, well, a bad example. They're collectively so bad that getting onto the freeway in my rental car in any other city in the U. S. is like a breath of fresh air. "Hey, honey, look at that guy: he just moved out of the left lane!" "Wow, it's like everybody in $CITY knows how to merge into a freeway. I want to live here!"

I won't, however, argue with your numbers. Tagging 60% in the "able to aim their car toward Bel-Square without hitting anything on the way" seems about right. And as you point out, it's the cause of much of the traffic woes of the Seattle area, not lack of road capacity. If everyone learned to merge smoothly, and realized it's not their $DEITY-given right to just randomly pick a lane to drive in, we could last another ten years before needing to add lanes.

Will we see a Ballad of John Henry about the last driver?