I agree that this is a risk, and it’s possible that it’s enough that this is a bad idea. I’m especially worried about very long stretches where you can see that a car is coming along, and so have plenty of time to pull out in front of it.
But I see two main mitigations:
Cutting other drivers off would still be a traffic violation and people don’t want to cause accidents, so I don’t think we get the worst behavior of sudden lane switching.
People might only use these lanes close enough to when they know that they are going to be getting out of them that they won’t people vulnerable to other people getting in front of them.
I agree that this is a risk, and it’s possible that it’s enough that this is a bad idea. I’m especially worried about very long stretches where you can see that a car is coming along, and so have plenty of time to pull out in front of it.
But I see two main mitigations:
Cutting other drivers off would still be a traffic violation and people don’t want to cause accidents, so I don’t think we get the worst behavior of sudden lane switching.
People might only use these lanes close enough to when they know that they are going to be getting out of them that they won’t people vulnerable to other people getting in front of them.