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Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

You don't have a right of way over a slow moving vehicle that merged ahead of you. Most ramps are not long enough to allow merging traffic to accelerate to highway speeds before merging, so many drivers free up the right-most lane for this purpose (by merging left)

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If you can safely move left to make room for merging traffic, you should. It’s considerate and reduces the chances of an accident.

Since a number of people are giving pushback, can you point to any (California-oriented) driving instructions consistent with this? I'm not seeing any. I see people saying "it's curteous", but when I'm driving I'm managing hundreds of variables and changing lanes is often risky, given motorcycles lanesplitting at high speed (quite common).

Definitely not California but literally the first part of traffic law in Germany says that caution and consideration are required from all partaking in traffic.

Germans are not known for poor driving.

Right- but the "consideration" here is the person merging onto the highway actually paying attention and adjusting, rather than pointedly not even looking (this is a very common merging behavior where I life). Changing lanes isn't without risk even on a clear day with good visibility. Seems like my suggestion of slowing down or speeding up makes perfect sense because it's less risky overall, and is still being considerate.

Note that I personally do change lanes at times when it's safe, convenient, I am experienced with the intersection, and the merging driver is being especially unaware.

Consideration is also making space for slower car wanting to merge and Germans do it.

It's not just courteous, it's self serving, AFAIK, a self-emergent phenomenon. If you're driving at 65 mph and anticipate a slow down in your lane due merging traffic, do you stay in your lane and slow down to 40 mph, or do you change lanes (if it's safe to do so) and maintain your speed?

Texas highways allow for much higher merging speeds at the cost of far large (land area), 5-level interchanges rather than 35 mph offramps and onramps common in California.

Any defensive driving course (which fall under instruction IMO) states that you don't always have to exercise your right of way, and indeed it may be unsafe to do so in some circumstances. Anticipating the actions of other drivers around you and avoiding potentially dangerous are the other aspects of being a defensive driver, and those concepts are consistent with freeing up the lane slower-moving vehicles are merging onto when it's safe to do so.

Most ramps are more than long enough to accelerate close enough to traffic speed if one wants to, especially in most modern vehicles.

Unless the driver in front of you didn't.

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