Road construction season is clipping right along in spite of winter’s reluctance to go somewhere else.

If you’re driving through the cone maze, it’s time to brush-up on your zipper merge skills.

That’s the technique designed to expedite the flow of traffic through lane closures by keeping vehicles in separate lanes until the merge point. Then you take turns squeezing into the funnel.

As drivers, we don’t always like when the rules of the road change -- especially when it involves merging and letting other drivers in. But city officials say this is the most effective technique.

The people who study this sort of thing say the method reduces backups by almost 40 percent and works best with traffic congestion.

When drivers see a "Lanes Closed Ahead" sign and traffic is backing up, drivers should stay in their current lane up to the point of the merge point and then take turns with other drivers to safely and smoothly merge into the remaining open lane.

Sometimes you may see a driver straddling the center line trying to block a lane for oncoming traffic trying to merge. Drivers can be cited for this violation.