Those jerks who wait until the last second to merge are actually right

I live in Los Angeles and the two behaviors I notice most frequently working against the greater good are the inability to merge properly and keep right, pass left.

All too often I see people reach a merge and arbitrarily stop, put their blinker on and wait for an opening. Stopping makes it much harder to exploit an opening and merge safely. Or, someone going well under the speed limit in the far left lane creating a barrier to faster moving traffic.

I have all sorts of hypotheses about people's territorial and juvenile behaviors while driving. Ultimately, I think it comes down to ignorance resulting from less than adequate driver's education.

Driving in parts of Europe gives you an appreciation for better driver's education. This recent post is perhaps tangential(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12674533), but it's in the spirit of my point about adequate driver's education. Similarly driving in some Central American countries is better in my experience.

They need the additional "keep lots of space ahead of you to allow cars to move in at traffic speed".

Given a stop-and-go merge, I think the best you can do is keep that left lane from forcing stop-and-go merging. if you can get a gap in the merging lane, the target lane can begin flowing more freely, thus opening space for the merging lane.

This could theoretically work, if and when we all let computers drive our cars. But not until then.