Sometimes Baffled

I'm sometimes baffled by human behavior.

This evening, I had to travel across town to Greentree - which meant going south on 276, and crossing at the Liberty Bridge. If you've ever done that particular jaunt, you know that around the stadiums, there's a merge point where you essentially have four lanes of traffic trying to condense down into two in order to me in the rightmost lanes for the bridge. At rush hour, this means that you're in start/stop traffic for about 10 minutes, with everyone trying to merge (or in rare cases, unmerge) from those lanes.

After I managed to merge into the proper lane, I intentionally left a car length between myself and the car in front of me - trying to be considerate of those who still needed to merge.

I had no less than three cars pass by me, in the left lane, with their turn signals on... and continue on past the opening I left them. Instead, they drove all the way to the last possible merge point and stopped, waiting for someone to left them merge, blocking a third lane of traffic.

Maybe it's petty of me, but by the time I reached that point, I had closed the gap between myself and the car in front of me. If they had been willing to take the opportunity I offered them, I would have gladly let them in. Instead, they decided to rush to the head of the line and see if they could cut in. With the result that they missed their chance to merge.

Why would someone do that?

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