Do you do much freeway travelling? Do you think about what you\u2019re doing when you get on the road? I didn\u2019t think about it much and naturally drifted across to the fast lane, despite seeing very big signs saying \u201cKEEP LEFT UNLESS OVERTAKING.\u201d Yes, remember we\u2019re in Australia, where we drive on the left, and the left lane is the slow lane.<\/p>\n
The F3 Freeway south of Gosford heading to Sydney is full in the morning. According to the RTA, the F3 carries in excess of 75,000 vehicles per day between Sydney and the Central Coast. From someone coming from the Sparks Rd entrance, it looks like the majority of vehicles get on at the Somersby interchange. The road is mostly a three-lane dual-carriageway, and it\u2019s the \u201cmostly\u201d bit that seems to cause the most trouble. Three lanes merging into two at 110 kph is never going to go as nicely as it theoretically could.<\/p>\n
In a perfect world, everyone would travel at exactly 110 kph on the freeway. Since everyone would speed up at exactly the same rate, and everyone would start off maintaining a three-second gap between themselves and the car in front, it should all be fine. Sure. Like that\u2019s<\/em> ever going to happen. Some people travel at 115, some at 120. There is always jostling for position, and people tend to drift to the right (fast) lane simply because by definition, it\u2019s going faster than the left (slow) lane. Leave a three second gap, and it\u2019s going to be filled in by another two cars.<\/p>\n UNLESS … you\u2019re travelling in the left lane. Try it some time. Travelling in the slow lane is almost always a better trip than travelling in the fast lane. There is no pressure. You can drive at 110 kph if you want, and not have people sitting on your tail and flashing their lights because you\u2019re not doing 120. You don\u2019t have to keep an eye out for speed cameras and police. You may encounter the odd truck going up a hill every now and then, but hey … you can almost always get around. You just have to look ahead a couple of hundred metres.<\/p>\n And do you know how much time you save over 75 km by breaking the law, getting stressed and endangering the lives of those around you? By doing 120 instead of 110? A whopping 2 minutes and 36 seconds.<\/p>\n The real kicker is Friday evenings. Without fail, the slow lane delivered me to my destination faster than the other two lanes. I don\u2019t know why, but I\u2019d guess it\u2019s simply because so many people believe that the fast lane will get them where they\u2019re going faster. So they gradually move to the right. They fix their eyes on someone in a left lane, and wait to pass them. And keep waiting. All the while, they watch the person on the left get further in front. As soon as they get sick of that, they move to the left to take advantage of the speedier lane, only to discover that a bunch of other people have done exactly the same thing at the same time, and the right lane starts moving faster. You can bet your bottom dollar that the driver is now keeping an eye on the gap they vacated to move left, and if it gets too far ahead, they\u2019re going to move right to keep from getting left behind. Unfortunately, a bunch of other people are doing exactly the same thing.<\/p>\n The really strange thing is that this only appears to happen in the middle and right lanes. The leftmost lane is left to people who are exiting the freeway, the trucks, and the few of us that won\u2019t run in the rat race because (a) it doesn\u2019t get you there faster; and (b) even if you win, that only makes you the fastest rat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You can bet your bottom dollar that the driver is now keeping an eye on the gap they vacated to move left, and if it gets too far ahead, they\u2019re going to move right to keep from getting left behind. Unfortunately, a bunch of other people are doing exactly the same thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cairns-family.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cairns-family.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cairns-family.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cairns-family.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cairns-family.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.cairns-family.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":140,"href":"https:\/\/www.cairns-family.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions\/140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cairns-family.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cairns-family.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cairns-family.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}