I've seen that as well and that only ever happens when the left most lane is also an exiting lane. It's not intuitive by any means but it's also consistent so if you know the rules and can see the road ahead, you'll be safe.
> Here in the US, the right lane very often "disappears", i.e. becomes an "exit only" lane.
Are there any instances where there isn't signage that informs drivers in advance? I'll drive in the right-most lane and if I see one of those signs, I'll check for traffic, signal and move to the lane to my left.
Also in the US they'll use left side exits, which pushes exiting traffic to the "fast" lane. Drives me crazy when road designers do this.
I think this also varies state-to-state, I recently drove from Colorado to Texas and it really seemed to me that in general TX drivers observe the "stay right except to pass" rule much more than CO drivers.
Looks like relatively normal behavior for a 7 lane road for either USA or Europe.
Highways with THAT many lanes typically have exits on both the right and left side. People will typically be on whichever side their exit is going to be on.
There cannot be more lane changes into and/or out of the left most lane than the 2nd to left most lane (assuming no left exits) because all lane changes go through it. Furthermore it is fairly easy to get a sense of the best lane by just paying attention.
Yeah, that situation is where I see it 2nd-most; first most is people trying to change lanes into an exit lane right at the exit when they're in a non-exit lane and want to exit. Those are lane changes, though, not merges.
In Europe, the lane to your left is in principle always oncoming traffic, unless you see a separate road to your left with a bit of grass in between. Or at least there will be a continuous instead of a dashed line.
I've noticed while driving in the US that American highway exits seem to be designed differently than those in the UK. The rightmost lane of three-lane highways will often become the exit lane, so if you stick to the rightmost lane you'll frequently need to switch lanes to your left to stay on the road. In the UK, in contrast, the exit lane is usually the new lane, and you have to switch lanes to get into it.
So instead of constant lane switching, use the middle lane for going straight ahead, and the leftmost lane for passing.
Easy to say, but that's not true in all places. Here's one where the left 2 lanes are left turn lanes, and the leftmost left turn lane turns into the 2nd from left lane.
Big potential for accident for the right left turn lane to accidentally also turn into the same (2nd from left) lane and crash.
And NO, they don't know a priori that the leftmost lane of the street they are turning into is a left turn lane.
Maybe I'm remembering the rules of left turns? As long as there was only one left turning lane (and you had the left turn arrow), you could turn into any of the new lanes (not just the left most lane).
Combine that with people who turn right into other-than-the-right-most-lane, and you've got a recipe for disaster.
It seems pretty consistent in the other videos they're showing, too. The left-hand lane marking splits into two lines ahead of the gore point. If the further of those two lines from the car is significantly stronger than the other, then the car will choose that as its new 'left lane' (rather than always choosing the nearer one) and follow it straight into the gore point. I don't think this is a mysterious bug, so much as a significant corner case where their system fails.
As others have stated, the left most lane is most certainly not always the "passing" lane. Which, for some people, the "passing" lane means "drive as fast as I want get out of my way" lane.
Maybe I didn't make it clear, people will be in the right lane and the assistant will instruct them last second to move to the left lane. This creates a dangerous situations as many US drivers do not care about traffic laws and cross the median. This is dangerous since this is generally unexpected to other drivers who will often have to sverve / brake to avoid collissions.
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