So, Your Humble Blogger has a bit of a new driving route these days, so I’m spending more time on one of those numbered state road that is one-lane, 45 mph, widening to two lanes for a traffic light every half-mile or so. You know: the merge sign is visible from the other side of the intersection, if you’re stopped at the light.\n
OK, I’m not sure how to describe this. Let’s call the first car in the left lane A<\/b>, and the one behind it B<\/b>, and the first car in the right lane C<\/b> and the one behind it D<\/b>. So A is next to C at the light, and behind them, B and D. Got it?\n
Now, the amazing part is this: usually, it works just fine. The light turns green, the cars start up, and in a half-block they are in one lane, A followed by C followed by B followed by D, all going 45 or more likely 55 miles an hour. That’s pretty fast maneuvering, and we manage it because it’s a pattern we all recognize, and we do it all the time, and most of the time we just ease into it without thinking. Think about how much work you have to be doing to drive a car anyway, how much pattern-recognition, extrapolation, co-ordination, all that stuff, and here’s a pattern half of high school graduates screw up on foot (at their graduation) and we do it all the time at high speed in two-ton death traps without thinking about it. Pretty cool, hunh?\n
Particularly because it isn’t always exactly the same. We’re prepared for car C to go slow, or for car C to go fast, or for car B to act like a dick, or a few things like that. Some of the time instead of A-C-B-D it goes A-B-C-D or C-A-D-B, or C-A-B-D, or A-C-D-B, and nobody gets hurt.\n
What set me thinking about it, though, was that yesterday I was car C, and we ended up D-A-B-C. And still nobody got hurt. And that’s fancy drivin’, Tex.\n
,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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