"Neil Gould" wrote in message
ink.net...
If you tried to drive that way in *this* town, you'd never get where
you're going. If you are more than the length of a vehicle behind another,
some idiot *will* squeeze in and cut you off. Assured Clear Distance is an
impossibility. It drives me nuts.

That is simply false, and I don't even need to know where you drive to know
that. As best I can tell, it's a claim made by people who secretly want to
tailgate and are just looking for an excuse.

I drive, in traffic, consistently with an appropriate distance between me
and the car in front of me. Regardless of speed, this is *at least* two car
lengths, to allow for safe lane changes in front of me. At normal highway
speeds, this over ten car lengths (minimum 2 seconds following distance, 176
feet at 60mph).

In stop and go traffic, there is *always* enough room between me and the car
in front of me for someone to change lanes and get in front of me. This is
*by design*, and has never resulted in me traveling backwards on the
highway, nor forced me to travel any slower than the slowest car on the
road.

There are three possibilities:
-- My lane is slower than the lane next to me. In this case, the only
people who wants to be in my lane are trying to get somewhere else (usually
to the off ramp, or from an on ramp over to another lane). These people
never slow me down.

-- My lane is going the same speed as the lane next to me. In this
case, an additional type of person who wants to be in my lane is the
dumb-ass that thinks that he will affect his trip time significantly by
bobbing back and forth from lane to lane (I used to be this dumb-ass, by the
way, until I figured out I wasn't saving any time). When the lanes are
going the same speed, there's not a steady supply of dumb-asses trying to
get in front of me, and the lanes continue to move at the same speed.

-- My lane is going faster than the lane next to me. In this case,
there is incentive for someone to change lanes in front of me, but depending
on how much faster my lane is going than the other, there either is not the
opportunity for many people to get in front of me (since we are traveling
past the other lane too quickly for many cars to safely switch lanes), or
the incentive to switch lanes quickly disappears (since as new cars enter my
lane, it drops back to the same speed as the other lane).

In all cases, allowing people to enter my lane freely in front of me does
not affect my travel time by any significant amount. The total delay over
an entire trip is on the order of less than 60 seconds, usually only 5 to 10
seconds.

I have used this technique all over the country, in some of the worst
traffic, with some of the most aggressive drivers, and it has never failed
me. I always get where I'm going, and I get there at practically the same
time I would have had I been tailgating.

The fact that you think a person trying to get into your lane in front of
you is an idiot (and they may be, since most people on the road are acting
like idiots) says more about your on-highway competitiveness than it does
about the person who simply wanted to change lanes in front of you. The
biggest problem with congestion is that people do exactly as you do,
providing no room for fluid movement between lanes, which is a necessity for
smooth flow of traffic at any speed.

The world needs more drivers like Colin, and fewer like you.

Pete