No One in St. Cloud Seems to Know How to do This Simple Thing

Full Dislosure - this is totally opinion based, but everyone who drives should know how to do this.

Diving.  Once you learn how to drive when you are 15 or 16... or older... it seems like you should be good to go, right?  Apparently not so much.  There are so many things that you have to learn by experience.  Timing, judgement, and the difference between a merge and a yield sign.  And now, something really exciting (sarcastic) the zipper merge.

Get our free mobile app

When you are in a construction zone and there is a merge sign people tend to move over immediately.  Or, they wait until the last possible second, drive in the clear lane going past all of the other cars, get to the front of the line and try to "bully" their way into the traffic line.  This, ahead of everyone else who has been "waiting" in that line for quite awhile.  The people in the traffic line feel entitled to make those "runners" wait... after all, we merged a long time ago, when we first saw the sign.  So, those people can just sit ther and wait their turn like everyone else, right??

Wrong.

What you are normally supposed to do is what is called a "zipper merge".  That is where you use both lanes up to the actual merge point, then take turns merging into one lane.  That is the best way to keep traffic moving as smoothly as possible and hopefully cause less of a back up.  But people here in Minnesota seem to not be able to either grasp that concept, or just refuse to do it.. or a combination of the two.

The person who is pulling out and running up the long line of cars to the merge point is actually in the right.  Only, everyone is supposed to be doing that.  But time and time again, people get very upset with that person who is trying to jump the line of cars.

There was a situation like this that happened.  If you skip to about 2 min in you will see someone who tries to pull out when someone is racing ahead of the line.  There was no obervance of what was going on behind them.  But actually everyone should be using both lanes at all times up to the merge point.  Running up the open lane tends to be dangerous if you are not using both lanes as a zipper merge.

Now, should we start a conversation about how people are stopping in the middle of a roundabout???