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Comment by CodeMage | Hacker News Reader

> Having driven both in Europe and the US, this is one of my pet peeves in the US.

Funny, one of my pet peeves since I moved to the US is the "keep right unless passing" or "left lane is for passing only" or any other variation of the same sermon. Sounds logical at first, but it's really bureocracy.

If the highway is congested, then the rule becomes meaningless. The traffic density is so high, that it's perfectly natural to use all of the available lanes.

If the highway is not congested, then the density is low enough that you should be able to change lanes as necessary, with minimal fuss. If that's the case, then the whole "keep to the right unless passing" is really just a crutch. In this situation, what we really want is something along the lines of "pay attention and don't make people pass you on the right", but that's not enforceable. So we come up with a rule like "keep to the right unless passing", because that can be enforced by cops.

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In my experience it isn't really the people in the left lane that present the biggest problem, it's the cruisers in the middle lane (on a three lane highway). They effectively cap the speed of the highway because you have to match their speed and squeeze in (they rarely leave a legal amount of distance) just to get to the other side of the highway to go faster, or to the right to take an exit. I really do wish cops would do some enforcement of the keep-right rule so the highway would flow smoothly.

> If the highway is congested, then the rule becomes meaningless

I don't think this is true. On a German three lane highway you normally have a lane of trucks driving 60 mph, a lane of cars going 80 mph and a line of cars going 100-120 mph. This arrangement follows naturally from "keep right unless passing" since each of the lanes is constantly passing the lane to its right.

You're completely missing the safety factor.

On European highways passing always occurs on the left, this means nobody should be ever passing you on your right.

When you have an emergency like a tire blowout, on a European highway you can safely merge right towards the shoulder with urgency and confidence nobody is coming up fast from behind and overtaking you on that side.

In the United States, you cannot make that assumption, people are overtaking on both sides at any time, it's basically chaos.

I would expect everyone going at different speeds in different lanes to increase congestion, because it encourages people who want to go faster than the general flow of traffic to jockey around a bunch, which then adversely impacts the speed at which everyone else can go as they react to all those sudden moves, which ultimately slows everything down even further.

Not entirely unlike how turbulence in a pipe decreases the overall rate at which water can flow through it.

> If the highway is congested, then the rule becomes meaningless.

> If the highway is not congested, then the density is low enough that you should be able to change lanes as necessary

In my experience there is a lot of middle ground between these two cases, where there is enough traffic that you can't change lanes as needed to get around a slow person in the left lane (often because that person is driving right next to another vehicle in the right lane, and their speeds are so similar that it takes a long time to resolve which one is passing which), but there's not enough congestion that it no longer makes sense to have any designated passing lane at all.

Living in the US and having grown up in Germany I couldn't agree more. Freeways could go so much faster if the slow people stayed on my right. During my commute I constantly am stuck between three card next to each other, happy to go 45-50 mp/h. At the same time I see cars changing lanes all the time to work their way around the slow cars. It's super dangerous. Visit LA and this gets dialed to 11.

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