But even if 2 dozen people go around you and creep into that following space, you've been cost like 45 seconds at worst. Better not to play the game.
Sometimes I think it's just people's reflexive scarcity mindset that tells them "that spot must not be that desirable or someone would be in it."
Regarding the broader topic of hitting your brakes, I find that I can commute 20 miles in stop and go traffic and only tap my brakes a couple of times. Helps to pace yourself behind the car 3 cars ahead of you instead of the guy right in front of you.
So it's bad to be mad while driving, but there's a lot of lane changes that deserve the ire. (It's a tiny fraction of drivers that get really bad, but a less tiny fraction of lane changes.)
Not a significant cost. But they sure as shit aren't getting what they think they're getting. Meaningfully farther ahead.
I now see it all as a risk assessment rather than as ritualistic combat.
Even if I do need to brake, speeding up more slowly also usually means I have more buffer time to slow down too.
You're just going to wind up being approximately the slowest person on the road, which is fine if you're constantly trying to go slower to build space but this means that a bunch of traffic that would have not gone around you will do so. This ups the danger vs a steady flow less all these lane changes because every "thing" other people do is an opportunity to do it badly.
Kinda ironic when you consider that TFA was about detecting dangerous merge situations in the data.
