Whereditgo
Journeyman Pro
I'm sure when I was taught to drive some 40 odd years back, that you should move in as soon as. That way you effectively have a single line that keeps moving. Rightly or wrongly, the jams only happen when people shoot down the inside of 100 cars queueing with the sole intention of pushing in. Surely that has to stop the line that should be moving. I don't know whether the "rules" have changed on merge in turn, never thought about it until this thread, but, if everyone started merging earlier, the one single line has to move quicker than it will if people wait until the last minute to effectively jump the queue.
They're not pushing in though, they are using the road as it was intended, take a section of a dual carriageway road that is reduced to a single lane with cones for roadworks. The risks to the workforce and road users will have been assessed and the place at which the traffic needs to merge into one lane decided upon and marked by the start of the cones. Failing to use both lanes and then merge causes a longer tailback of traffic which can then impact on traffic joining the affected road from the previous junction. for e.g.
There was exactly this scenario on my route into work for several months, despite there being a large temporary flashing sign saying "use both lanes then merge" every morning some clown would try to block both lanes to stop the traffic they perceived to be queue jumpers, which caused the slip road to back up, the roundabout above the main route to back up and all the feeder roads onto the roundabout to back up.