Yielding and the Art of the Merge

I drive for my job. A lot.

I cover offices from Kittery, ME to Caribou, ME, which is essentially next to Canada. Per Mapquest, the distance is actually 348.58 miles. If I were to stick a push pin through Kittery and let the State of Maine flip vertically, Caribou would actually be further south than NYC.

This isn’t a bad gig, though, cause I like driving. I turn on the radio and listen to new songs, sing songs I know at the top of my lungs , chat with my Garmin (it’s the only voice in the car!) see beautiful new things, and for hours on end get lost in my own thoughts. Plus, I rather like visiting all the people in my different offices. The only thing I am really trying to stop/learn is to stop texting/Tweeting/emailing while I’m driving.

It’s interesting, however, the things you observe and learn while you are spending hours of your life tooling around in a little 2007 Toyota Camry. For example, today I drove to one of our corporate offices in New Jersey. From Portland, ME to Parsippany, NJ there are approximately one bajillion highway exits (yes, I counted carefully) and over 300 miles of highway.

With all those lanes and ramps and whatnot, I discovered a serious problem we have developed on highways. That problem can be stated pretty simply: “When the heck did we decide to give up on yielding and merging?” Which made me start to think…have we given up on yielding and merging in our whole lives, not just driving?

I’d like to think that we still live in a world where being nice and considerate are the appropriate things to do, but seeing these crazy people on the road I wonder if that’s true. It’s heralded now to go blazing ahead without thinking all things out, to do “whatever it takes” to get ahead, to have tunnel vision forging forward towards your goal. But there are a few things that we could all grow from if we just thought a little more about yielding and merging in our careers, friendships, relationship and lives overall.

• Yield to avoid danger/accidents – There’s a reason that little triangle at the end of entrance ramps is bright red. If high school algebra taught us nothing, it is that traffic is blasting past you going at least 60 MPH (and let’s be real, it’s more like 75-80 MPH) while you are trying to merge in at 45 MPH will cause an issue. Additionally, if you are one of the cars going hyptothetically 60 MPH and some jackass is gunning it to get ahead of you, don’t make the situation worse by not allowing them in. Sometimes, you have to let people be jackasses to save yourself a trip to the ER.
• Don’t yield if it puts you in a bad position/danger – That being said you don’t want to be the person always moving and yielding and letting those other cars have complete control over the highway. If you move over just because the big scary 18-wheeler is attempting to merge in and your exit is the next one on a highway civilly engineered by a 5 year old with tinker toys, you could have to jam on your brakes/speed through the lanes/swerve around and about. If nothing else, you might just miss your exit, and on the highway it’s sometimes hard to get back to where you want to be.
• Pay attention to your blind spot – I literally almost got side-swiped by a silver PT Cruiser attempting to merge off an exit ramp by using ONLY his driver’s side mirror. Seriously, I watched him in that self same mirror. Now, I drive a Jeep Patriot (when I’m not in my pimped out company car) and am well aware of the fact that I can’t see jack from the middle of my rear door to the back of the vehicle. Some people either completely ignore their blind spots or don’t know they are there and they continue using only one method which is probably not the most effective.
• Merging is sometimes based on where you are – In Maine, we fight at four-way stops “You go first” – “No YOU go first” (by the way, it’s called a RIGHT of way for a reason, the person to the RIGHT wins…) On the New York Thruway, you fight to survive. This is the first time I have driven by myself to our corporate office, and I was pretty much terrified. As I drove down I-287 (or I-87….Garmin could tell you where we were) I was hesitant, slow and overly cautious. People with NY plates sped past me on both sides laying on their horns, gesturing and in general making me fear for my life. In that moment I knew what I had to do. I heard Gonna Fly Now in full surround sound and, as if taking a bite of super lox on a Brooklyn Bagel, I drove like Ellsbury would outrun a play at the Yankee stadium plate. I dodged, dipped, dived, ducked and dodged my way across the Tappan Zee Bridge and Garden State Parkway. Oh yeah, I’m pretty badass…

How much easier would it be if we all took some of these things into account, not just when driving but in our lives in general?

What about you?

How are you at yielding and the art of the merge?

Photo Credit: Logan Seale/Getty Images