Motorway on-ramps. ‘Merges’. We all know them. Bloody-dangerous things!
If you’re a driver, and unless you’ve been living in the backblocks far from cities and interstates, you’ll know them all too well! They’re the launch-ramp you have to take in order to get from ‘domestic speed’ to ‘hyper-speed’ while dodging speeding asteroids and comets, some as large as full-sized trucks and weighing up to a hundred tonnes.
Here in my city, as in this entire nation (which is never going to feel entire ‘my nation’) there are well-established rules that govern these ‘orbital-insertions’. Rules that someone, at some point in history, had to nut out and precisely write down and then teach to every noob driver coming through the ranks of teenage life (and those too; getting their licences in later decades; poor buggers.)
And the rule is this: If you’re the one on the on-ramp, you’re the one who has to Give Way.
It goes like this: You’re driving an automobile filled with valuable loved-ones, paying passengers or expensive Goods & Services and you are accelerating up to motorway speed on a short lane that is soon going to completely disappear from under your wheels. Directly beside you, in the most awkward location over your shoulder for you to see them clearly, are large speeding automobiles driven by demons …
… And you have to give way to them!
They’ve got all the aces, ALL OF THEM! Clear view ahead. Clear view of you. Top speed. An infinite lane ahead. And they’ve got their ‘patch’. And you’re trying to muscle onto their patch.
Legally, they have the right to keep on driving in their patch, at their speed, and not let you in. Legally, they’re not required to give a shit. They’ve got all the rights, all the privileges, and full entitlement to their place on the motorway. They’ve got all the power, ALL OF IT:, Speed, Position, Lane, and Best View Angles. Four Aces to your 3-of-Clubs. Who controls this moment? They do. Who can ensure the safest, most equitable outcome for everyone involved? They do. And yet they’re not required to use any of it.
Basically: they have the legal right to be an Arsehole. And some of them do.
And this is the Rule That Was Written, and Handed Down to the masses via the Road Code and the Driving Instructors. And it is without a doubt and screamingly obviously a rule written by the Privileged and the Entitled to reinforce the idea of privilege and entitlement. A Capitalistic Rule, basically.
And I’m quite quite sure that they never even thought about it that way. It was automatic; entrenched. Yet another of the thousands of tiny details enshrined in Law that work to protect Power and Privilege.
And it’s dumb, stupid, counter-intuitive and downright dangerous. Totally back-to-front.
How do we change this stuff? First, become aware of it. Name it. Discuss it. Create conversation. Expose it! Diss it! Call it out for what it is: another example of entitlement at work. Nationalise it. Commission studies. Get crash data. Create a case. Take it to the top. <Sigh> Yeah; that’s gonna take dedication.
Now I believe that somewhere in Scandinavia they already have the more sensible, safer, more ‘socialist’ merging rule in force. If you’re the one on the motorway, you’re responsible for ensuring a safe merge.
But ten minutes of Googling did not find the facts I was looking for. If you know this, please tell me.
But the beautiful thing is – here in Brisbane at least, and despite the intrinsic arrogance of this dumb-arse law – 9 times out of 10 of us caring humans do just sort it out. We ease off, we leave a gap. Time after time, most-every day, when the traffic is utterly stopped, some complete random will leave me a gap to slide into, and I’ll do the same for them. Yes – even for ute-drivers. Humans are essentially Socialists.
Ged Maybury :: Steamed Up 