Driver Zippering

When two lanes go down to one on the highway and traffic backs up, I'm one of those people who pulls into the slow-moving lane early. For some reason I always assumed this to be common courtesy, and I always thought that people who stayed in the fast lane until the last moment were behaving like jerks. I'm one of those people who would never let them in when the lanes finally merged. Turns out, you're supposed to wait until the last second to merge, and then you're supposed to take turns going into the one remaining lane. It's called "zippering" by the department of transportation, and it's proven to decrease the amount of time that everyone waits in traffic. It's odd to have science prove to you that you're a jerk, and you have been for a long time.