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Comment by ivanhoe | Hacker News Reader

This rule exists in many European countries, but afaik it only applies to situations when the lane is blocked or stops there, so all cars have to move into one lane. It's totally OK however to not let into the lane people who're using an empty lane on purpose to pass by others and jump the queue. If the car has the road in front of it to continue moving, so they don't need to switch the lanes, you don't have to let them in.

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> t's totally OK however to not let into the lane people who're using an empty lane on purpose to pass by others and jump the queue

In Germany, this behavior is explicitly forbidden by the law.

If there is a merge, one car of each lane has to go through the merge each time.

That is, if you are at the end of the lane that gets merged, and you let one car pass, then you have the right to go and merge next. The next car in the other lane must yield, if they don't and there is a crash, it's 100% their fault.

This is so that the lanes that merge get used to their maximum capacity. If the intent were for cars to merge earlier, they would just have made these lanes shorter.

Absolutely, but only if there's a merge of lanes. If this is just the empty lane that people use to get to the front of the queue, like when there's a traffic jam to enter the highway and some cars are trying to cut the line, then you don't have to let them. I'm aware that this is not a common problem in normal countries like Germany where drivers generally behave well, but if you ever find yourself waiting in a line somewhere in Italy or say in Balkans, you'll often see cars trying to push past you by cutting the queue using empty and service lanes.

Leaving a blocked lane early reduces the storage capacity of the road. In slow traffic/traffic jams the rule is to use all lanes possible until very close to the blockage. If you break that rule the jam becomes longer and could affect a crossing upstream.

Jumping the queue counters this negative effect and is the correct behavior (in slow traffic).

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