(08-08-2019, 04:34 PM)ijmorlan Wrote: 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.
Agreed. I've seen on-ramp merges without a dotted line before (probably in the US but maybe it was Quebec) and I hated them. With the majority of on-ramps the incoming traffic is obliged to accelerate to speed of traffic / sync up with a gap instead of slowing every else down with a lazy merge. Their lane truly does end and they're changing from a lower speed zone to a faster one, versus a construction lane closure where the inbound/outbound speed of all lanes involved in the merge remains the same.
...K