“Giving people more viable alternatives to driving means more people will choose not to drive, so there will be fewer cars on the road, reducing traffic for drivers.”
Concise, easy to understand, and accurate. I have used it at least a dozen times and it is remarkable how well it works.
Also—
“A bus is about twice as long as a car so it only needs to have four to six passengers on board to be more efficient than two cars.”
Someone can logically agree to something but emotionally still hate it.
Logically, car drivers should understand and appreciate the zipper merge, bc it makes traffic better. But emotionally it’s too difficult for them to let someone in ahead of them.
Same thing you can explain about alternatives to cars making traffic better. But when they see money or (God forbid) space on the road going to infrastructure other than cars, it will feel like a zero sum game again.
That is the biggest challenge I’ve experienced in trying to promote alternatives
Opposition to the zipper merge might be a regional thing. Where I’m from, people can zipper merge just fine, especially after the state transportation agency put up a bunch of billboards telling people to do it.
Lmao no cars around here will still form miles long line ups because they all think it’s an asshole move to skip the traffic, somehow not realizing that it wouldn’t be possible to do that if they just utilized both lanes until the merge.