it's a merge

I have driven all over the country and never have I encountered more people incapable of merging than in southern California. Here, the orderly process of integrating vehicles from an entrance ramp into moving traffic by creating alternating openings in the right lane is a foreign concept. Instead, people drive slowly up the entrance ramp holding their cell phones against the left side of their faces, ignoring the dozens of cars whipping by them at 70mph, and cheeky SUVs speed up on the ramp to brazenly cut off traffic in the right lane. They seem to think that if they go slowly or quickly enough they will just naturally be absorbed by the high velocity mass of the highway. (Which is true, by the way—but this technique is not so much ‘merging’ as it is, say, ‘crashing’ or ‘manslaughter.’)

Really, it’s not that they’re bad drivers—it’s more that they don’t have a common understanding of how the merge is supposed to be handled. For example, in Tehran (the world capital of maniacal driving) drivers may routinely cut each other off as well as create 8 one-way fastlanes out of two-way residential roads, but at least everyone knows to expect it. But here, it’s every driver for himself and I just don’t understand it. This is a region of the country where everyone drives because public transportation is extremely limited and the cities are sprawled out over miles and miles of territory, so you’d think that all of this driving practice would have instilled some common sense in the local population. In addition, it’s a well-known fact that there are very few native southern Californians who live in southern California. This means that the majority of the people who live here came from somewhere else—born and bred of people who know how to merge properly. So what has happened? Why can’t we merge down here? People of southern California—remember who you are! And for God’s sake, check your blind spot!!