Merging FAIL

I have defended New Jersey drivers for quite some time. I'm not about to risk my credibility by saying we're the best drivers in the country, but a) we're a hell of a lot better than Maryland drivers (who suck...A LOT), and b) we drive crappily, but we drive crappily better than any other crappy drivers out there.

Despite this, New Jerseyans do have an issue with one particular driving maneuver, and I've never understood why.

Merging, contrary to popular belief in the Garden State, is not that fucking hard. Really now. It's like a zipper--one at a time, just like they taught us in elementary school--and the farther behind the merge that you begin to "zip up," the less of a bottleneck the merge itself becomes.

Today, while driving east on I-80 coming home from State College, I experienced one of the most abysmal merges of all time. The highway already had a solid white line between the left and middle lane, and most traffic was in the right two lanes. One mile before, a large orange sign indicated that three lines would be reduced to one. Thinking ahead, I switched into the right lane. My job was done.

But since most of the driving public isn't as smart as me, they took the impending merge as an opportunity to spread out further, from two lanes into all three. So now, when the first lane merged over, where it had earlier been empty, it was now a disaster in and of itself. Awesome.

The second part of the merge was even better, though, because with two lanes of impatient motherfuckers trying to get one inch ahead, I should have expected the worst. But I didn't. So when I saw cars shifting quickly into the shoulder just ahead of me, I was alarmed.

Then I noticed why. Someone had rear-ended another person. But it wasn't someone merging in who got hit. It was two people who were in the same lane the whole time. Someone merged in, the car in front stopped, the car behind didn't.

Now, for a little deductive reasoning. If we examine the rules of merging above, we have to conclude that the person who failed was either a) the one who merged in when they shouldn't, or b) the guy who wouldn't let someone else merge in appropriately. So who's the only innocent one? The guy who got rear-ended. There's no justice.

Sure, I got a road-raging laugh out of it, but it's kinda sad too. It's not really that hard, folks. Just remember: it's like a zipper.