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I'm not sure it's that negligible. Mythbusters found that weaving in and out of traffic could save between 5 and twenty-five percent. Now A) Mythbusters did an experiment with an N of like 4 or something, along a single commute in the Bay Area, so it's basically anecdote and I'd love a better source if one existed, but it is at the very least proof-by-existence that larger impacts on travel time _can_ happen. And their non-weaving person was, if I recall from the video, not constantly decelerating to keep a buffer.

And from personal experience in some places, keeping such a buffer, in some traffic conditions would just literally be impossible. There are sometimes enough aggressive drivers such that they can just consume it faster than one would be able to create it. It is simply not always the case that you have sole power to create and keep the recommended buffer size (although very often it is and you can).

I keep a decent buffer whenever I am able, but at some point, you have to bow to road conditions.

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25% of time saved corresponds to increasing your average speed by 1/(1-0.25)=33%, for example from 45 to 60.
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Letting a large fraction of the freeway cut in front of you will turn normal drivers behind you aggressive, or at least aggressive enough to go around you. There's a balance to be struck.
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Oh no! Cars will go around you!
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Cars making aggressive maneuvers around you is dangerous for you.
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If plain old overtaking results in "aggressive maneuvers", you should not be driving a car.
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The premise of this line of comments is that the other drivers are acting aggressively. Whatever you're picturing in your head is a different situation from what everyone else is talking about.
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In your haste to be snide and look down your nose what you've ignored is that this interaction is not "free".

Traffic moving with an approximately constant following distance is safer than traffic where one element is constantly traveling under speed to build up a following distance and is slowly filtering to the back as traffic comes upon and then moves around it. If the lane people are pulling into for passing is traveling substantially faster than the traffic that is being queued up behind to be passed then some amount of the people pulling out to pass are necessarily going to do so aggressively or within thinner than "perfect world" margins.

Every thing drivers on the road must perform carries some inherent risk. That a bunch of traffic that would have not gone around you will have done so means that many otherwise unnecessary merges or lane changes and then lane changes back will have happened. Each one of these represents an opportunity for things to go wrong above whatever the baseline is.

What I am saying is not groundbreaking or rocket science and the fact that I have to spell it out in detail to an adversarial audience speaks volumes about this audience and the volumes it speaks are not positive.

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