Sweden has the same laws, but everyone still merges early because some sense of "fairness" kicks in, and people don't understand that they're making any queuing worse by not utilizing all available road surfaces.
I've stopped caring about other people's sense of fairness in these situations, and I always use the empty lane and merge late. The law is on my side, and people can glare and honk as much as they like. I just saved five-ten minutes of not queuing, they could too if they all learned to drive correctly.
Personally I like to merge at the first opportunity its comfortable to do so to save me the potential stress and hassle of having to force myself between two cars at the last minute. But I've also never felt any animosity for people who pass me while I'm chilling in my lane.
I felt that way, and while you may have to wait a few cars, someone will always let you in. The likelihood of continual dickishness is limited by the multiplicative effect of independent events.
As a Brit, I always merge early due to the sense of fairness. However, this is strongly enforced by the nature of road signs, which show, say 500m ahead, a diagram with an arrow on the right merging to the left.
All it would take would be a consistent change of sign showing merging in turn at lane-merge to change this behaviour
The odd thing is that you do see very occasional zip-merge signs in the UK, which tend to reinforce the idea that zip-merge should any be used in exceptional circumstance.
As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, I merge early as a defensive/safety measure.
People here will follow each other incredibly closely, even at high speeds, and quite often they won't slow down to let you in if you're trying to merge.
I've stopped caring about other people's sense of fairness in these situations, and I always use the empty lane and merge late. The law is on my side, and people can glare and honk as much as they like. I just saved five-ten minutes of not queuing, they could too if they all learned to drive correctly.