Joseph Rueter

I wonder if the way we drive sheds any light on how we can or do embrace innovation. I wonder why on the highway in big cities we crowd up at the beginning of merging entrance and/or exit ramps. I wonder if that sheds any light on describing why we don’t see any more innovation than we do. I wonder if thinking differently about driving could lead to the next billion dollar company. What do you think?

My typical commute includes driving through Minneapolis on Hwy 94 west bound and exiting on Hennepin. That exit ramp is a single lane of traffic on the right side of the road, nothing crazy here, and starts as an entrance ramp to 94 from 35W North. I think there are literally thousands of places like this in the country. It’s about a 1/2 mile long. Yeah, pretty cool. It’s plenty of distance to get our merge on. It’s blocks and blocks of wonderful lane changing opportunity.

Every-single-day, everyone and their Grandma intending to exit on Hennipin and all of their cousins trying to enter the flow of traffic on 94 from 35E all pile up at the beginning of this long entrance/exit ramp and wait for each other to merge. Shoot, most of the time people merge across the solid white lines before they turn to dashes and say “it’s time to merge.” Apparently you get points for being extra extra early to the next lane. Who knew.

Anyway, I don’t get it and I don’t proclaim I have an answer. I am just wondering about it. Is there something here to be learned. It seems peculiar enough to look into. The only thing I can come up with is that, as a whole, we like predictability far far more than we are maybe cognitively aware of. It expresses itself all over and in our driving too. Maybe most of us just follow and do as others are do and a couple people are this way. That’s plausible. Yet, it seems everyone wants to just get in line for whatever they’re expecting to happen as soon as it’s fundamentally possible to do so. Then we wait for what we expect to happen to actually happen. Maybe we get something from this. Maybe a chemical reward in our brains or something. What ever it is, in the very least we habitually follow those who do.

I could be reading into this too much. I am OK with that. But it seems so interesting to me that there is ALWAYS a line to get in line at this spot on the hwy. I wonder, why don’t we have lines to get inline for the change innovation brings? The only other place we get in line to get inline that I can think of is the airport. Is this get in line to get inline simply about predictability? In that case, it’s clearly not enough for us to know that if we miss our entrance/exit ramp there will always be another ramp coming up soon. It’s interesting that we have lines to get in line for change on the hwy but not in business and not for innovation. Is that interesting enough to you to go find some dollars in it?