doubleapex

DAalseth said:

nunzy said:

You don't merge at 1 MPH. You merge at the speed of the traffic you are joining.

Unless you are an old lady who never has merged before. Then you cause accidents.

Unless you are waiting for a hole in traffic. 1mph is essentially stopped. It was waiting for an opening.

Exactly. I do the merge almost daily where the Apple car was hit. If it was during commute time, then a driver in that lane is looking back at a solid procession of cars traveling at 45-55 mph. The "merge" lane is tiny and uphill, so you really aren't going to have a chance to accelerate to 55 mph in that short distance unless you're putting the pedal to the metal.

Pure speculation based on what I've seen human drivers sometimes do: if the car made it half-way down the merge lane and then detected that it wouldn't have an opening and then slowed to basically a stop (1mph) then a driver approaching the merge lane might be focused on looking left for an opening and not notice the car now effectively stopped in front of it.

Ah and some other silly articles say that this was near Apple's HQ in Cupertino. No. This was ~ 1 mile from their new leased Sunnyvale campus (the one that looks like a scaled down 3 ring version of the spaceship HQ). That new Sunnyvale campus seems to have had its big employee move in day last week, I noticed caravans of moving trucks clogging the major road leading into it.