Purpose Driven Driving: On Ramps

Surprisingly the purpose of on ramps seems to elude some people, Tamara fills them in:

That little strip of concrete or asphalt that connects the surface street to the freeway? That's called the "On Ramp". The purpose of the onramp is to allow your wheezy family bus to chug up to something approaching combat speed so that you can merge safely into the traffic on the freeway, instead of just standing there like a duck in thunder, watching the cars whiz past you.

My mother initially taught me to merge onto a highway by using the on-ramp to find an appropriate space and then accelerating into position with it. Once I began to drive myself I realized that this was not the way to go about things. You get up to roughly traffic speed at the top of the ramp (if possible), then you fit yourself in at the bottom. If you do it this way, then you only need a carlength or two to make the merge. If you go slow then speed up, you need much more space because of the higher speed differential with traffic.

The real pain in the butt is when the guy in front of you doesn't know how to merge. A commenter over at Tamara's place has this to say:

When I can, and I'm not ruining someone else's day, the solution to these goobers is to identify them well before it's critical and SLOW DOWN.

Yes, counterintuitive. But what happens is, you open space between yourself and them and let them booger their way into the traffic flow, and then floor it and merge somewhat normally because they've invariably slowed things down.

Yup this works. Leave space, they merge in and get traffic all tied up. You accelerate into the space you created, merge relatively normally, and you're on your merry way.