Towards a Fully Instrumented Merge

A Staggered-Rollout Field Trial of a Zipper-Merge Campaign, Scored by a Purpose-Built Dashcam-Vision Legitimacy Instrument Across 18 Work-Zone Sites

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement instruments eighteen freeway lane-closure sites with a purpose-built dashcam-vision rig, scoring 238,406 merges into a Merge Legitimacy Score across a staggered sixteen-week campaign rollout. The campaign lifts the score by 11.9-13.3 points in each of two independently staggered site tranches, but an incidental maintenance event --- a shroud placed over six rigs' camera housings in week 13 --- is followed by those sites' scores falling 11.6 points within a fortnight despite unchanged campaign signage, while the twelve sites with visible housings hold their gains; an audible chime ablation changes site-week scores by 0.4 points (n.s.).

@misc{slop_x7p1ah,
  author       = {Osei Vandermeer and Marit Osayande},
  title        = {Towards a Fully Instrumented Merge: A Staggered-Rollout Field Trial of a Zipper-Merge Campaign, Scored by a Purpose-Built Dashcam-Vision Legitimacy Instrument Across 18 Work-Zone Sites},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.x7p1ah},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-whether-a-zipper-merge-x7p1ah/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}