Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road

[ijmorlan]

This is the only stable solution of which I am aware to the merging problem. If everybody merges early, then as others have pointed out, what is the other lane for? And if everybody aggressively takes “their” spot right to the merge point, you get unstable and dangerous traffic flow. As is often the case, the two “sides” of the “debate” are both wrong.

Incredibly well said.

My favourite merge occurred on Hwy 403 eastbound near the Grand River a few years ago. Some clever contractor put up a sign that showed two lanes merging without either lane ending, and that's exactly how the road cones were set up with the dotted line through the centre of the merge blacked out. Traffic had  to zipper merge to the centre where the dotted line had been, then the cones veered us left into the lane which remained open. Neither 'side' of the debate existed as it was a true zipper merge of equally prioritized lanes. I don't know if that was just an experiment by the MTO or what because I haven't encountered it anywhere else since, but it was brilliant. 

Thank you!

Excellent point about the symmetric merge. Our usual paint is wrong for a narrowing situation; a better way to do it is to have traffic in either incoming lane have to cross a dashed line to get into the new single lane (or what you saw). Then it’s clear that everybody has to cooperate, rather than people in one lane being considered to have the right of way. The usual non-symmetric paint then encourages people in the ending lane to get out of it early so they don’t have to worry about the merge; then other people use the now-empty lane to zoom past the other people, which then looks like queue-jumping.

On-ramp merges are different — I’m not really suggesting changing the paint there.