Traffic in Knightsbridge, 1960s., originally uploaded by Fray Bentos

On people’s reactions to traffic lane restrictions, The Urge to Merge:

So I started consulting professionals on my own: traffic engineers, the highway police, queuing theorists. The learning curve, it must be said, was robust. I hadn’t known queuing had theories. But of course it does, mathematicians and business-operations people have to work them out, the heart-attack patient gets in ahead of the sprained ankle and nobody has a problem with that, and anybody who has been to Europe intuitively understands what one engineer meant when in midsentence he said to me, “perfect England,” meaning culturally mandated compulsive queuing, and, “perfect Italy,” meaning culturally mandated compulsive nonqueuing. I learned about the father of modern queuing theory, an early 1900s Dane whose specific who-goes-first challenge was the new Copenhagen telephone system, which required callers, disembodied but queued nonetheless, to be moved along in a way both maximally efficient and acceptable to all.

This is particularly bad in New York City where highways can go from four to two lanes abruptly.
The key to faster traffic? Don’t get in line too early and let the sidezoomers in.