I’ll start. Stopping distance.
My commute is 95 miles one way to work, so I see a lot of the highway, in the rural part of the US. This means traveling at 70+ mph (112km/h) for almost the entirety of the drive. The amount of other drivers on the road who follow behind someone else with less than a car’s length in front of them because they want to go 20+ over the speed limit is ridiculous. The only time you ever follow someone that close is if you have complete and absolute trust in them, and also understand that it may not even be enough.
For a daily drive, you likely need 2-3 car lengths between you at minimum depending on your speed to accurately avoid hitting the brakes. This doesn’t even take into account the lack of understanding of engine braking…
What concepts do you all think of when it comes to driving that you feel are not well understood by the public at large?
That’s not zipper merging. That’s just poor merging. I guess technically you can zipper merge on a ramp if there is traffic, and like you said you’d want to use the whole acceleration lane even though you won’t be accelerating in traffic.
Zipper merging is when 2 lanes goes down to 1 lane
It is better for all cars to use both lanes completely until it gets down to 1 lane.
People don’t understand it in the US.
If a mile down the road you see it going to 1 lane. You shouldn’t try to merge over soon. You should drive all the way down in your lane and merge at the last moment.
But you’ll get a mile long single file line of cars and the few cars that pass are considered assholes trying to cut to the front.
If you broke up that mile long single file line and had two 1/2 mile lines in 2 lanes that zipper merged. Everyone would get through the bottleneck faster.