afaikilt

yeah.. we have merge in turn here, the curved arrow on the road at the end of a lane means this. we also have text signs for "use both lanes" and "merge in turn"

but mostly people are not too keen to actually follow the rules.. i used to follow the pack, now i just follow the instructions and merge as late as possible. - probably this makes me an asshole

The length of that q is halved, imho traffic issues are caused by one bottlenecks tailback into a junction or similar and creating a bottleneck elsewhere.

its like bandwidth. you are keeping twice the bandwidth up until the last possible moment, meaning the bottle neck is going to be "fed" as efficiently as possible with half the chance of causing a knock on effect elsewhere.

but this is not just a german thing.. in the UK there is a curved arrow sign on the road where one lane ends meaning "merge in turn"

you will also see signs saying: "use both lanes" and "merge in turn" (but as text) which are all the same thing.

you will often see it say after a junction or roundabout where maybe 200m later the road goes from two to one lanes. encouraging you not to just queue right through the previous junction and block that up too.