Letters from the Equator

travelling on malaysian roads is not a very enjoyable experience. although our traffic and road infrastructure isn’t all that bad, we have a long way to go in terms of social etiquette.

i was driving back down to KL from Penang yesterday, taking over from my dad after lunch in Ipoh… and I always have a problem getting pissed off with drivers who don’t keep their distance, cut lanes, and act like they own the road. instinctively, i wanted to return the favor, but that would mean me becoming a road bully as well.

the roads were quite congested, even though we were all cruising along quite nicely below the speed limit, but there are just a few cars prefer to drive above the limit. so, they have to either weave in and out of cars between the two lanes or push you to move aside from behind. so, after my frustration kind of died down, i just decided to move aside whenever some big jock from behind closed in too fast.

then there’s always the problem of the big trucks who travel at half the speed, creating a bottleneck of cars trying to move into the fast lane. that was when i remembered reading an article about curing lane-merging traffic problems awhile back. the main point of the article was to let people ease into the fast lane easier, if you were already on the fast lane… instead of adopting a no-you-can’t-cut-into-my-line attitude.

it’s quite fascinating, actually… and i decided to try it out. i had been travelling fairly slowly trying to fight off rows of cars trying to get into the fast lane where i was. when i decided to try the solution suggested by the article, i found that traffic moved along much faster because the cars on the slow lane didn’t have to slow down too much to merge into the fast lane (because i gave them space to merge)… so even though i did have to slow down a little for the cars to merge, it wasn’t really that slow.

anyway, next time on the road with a traffic merging problem, you can try that out.