A14/A428/M11 junction
Oct. 26th, 2009 11:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackAt the north end of the M11, the A14 westbound merges with the M11 northbound, and then splits into an A14-eastbound slip-road and A14 westbound. As far as I can tell, all of the A14 traffic wants to continue on the A14 (there were slip-roads for the M11 sound and A428 east before this), and the M11 traffic normally wants to turn off onto the A14 east. The M11 traffic might want to continue on the A14 west, but it never does seem to. That's hard to describe in words, but it's simple in a picture:
http://maps.google.co.uk/?ie=UTF8&ll=52.232662,0.071239&spn=0.011223,0.027595&z=15
The point is, it represents an interesting rare example of harmony: normally when traffic tries to merge there's a conflict of interest between people who are already in a lane and want to keep their place and people who want to move into that lane. However, here, almost everyone in the left lane wants to be in the right lane and vice versa, so everyone has an incentive to let the others match speed and move across (else they'd be blocking the way for you to move). And this normally actually happens!
http://maps.google.co.uk/?ie=UTF8&ll=52.232662,0.071239&spn=0.011223,0.027595&z=15
The point is, it represents an interesting rare example of harmony: normally when traffic tries to merge there's a conflict of interest between people who are already in a lane and want to keep their place and people who want to move into that lane. However, here, almost everyone in the left lane wants to be in the right lane and vice versa, so everyone has an incentive to let the others match speed and move across (else they'd be blocking the way for you to move). And this normally actually happens!