Mildly Interesting

I see the same on my commute, but it isn't random. The same lanes consistently move faster between the same stretches every day. If you know how and when to merge, you can shave a significant amount of time off your drive.

I have a 100 mile round trip commute that I've been doing for over a decade and think I have enough real world experience to say that it's really just dumb luck as to whether weaving will get you ahead or not based on the layout of traffic at any given moment.

I used to do it more often but wound up getting boxed in enough times to lose all my progress and these days I don't really care if it takes me an extra 5 or 10 minutes of travel time. I pretty much now reserve it for situations where some douchebag wants to act like the hall monitor of the road and obstruct the passing lane by refusing to pass cars in the center lane "because I'm already going five over!"

I've personally found that weaving is definitely faster, but you have to be strategic about it. If there are three or more lanes, often people will weave between the two left-most lanes (right-most if you live in one of those weird countries where people drive the wrong way), thus clogging up those lanes. I find that if you stick to the 'slowest' lane you actually end up going faster, especially on highways because there are cars in that lane trying to get off and clearing space in front as you go. This falls apart when you have a very busy exit, but usually you can avoid it by looking at traffic on waze or google maps.

I've seen something similar, they did a race between one person trying to go as fast as possible and another person sticking to a single lane. The weaving person was like 2% faster but was totally exhausted.