He seems to have mixed feelings:
There are three lanes, with the left two lanes narrowing into one. A slight bit further ahead, the traffic from Gallows Road merges into the right lane, map here.
Many people from the far left lane merge “unethically,” driving ahead as far as they can, and then asking to be let in at the near-front of the queue. The traffic from Gallows Road, coming on the right, merges ethically, as it is a simple feed of two lanes nto one. They have no choice as to when the merge is, although de facto the construction of the intersection puts many of them ahead of the Rt.50 drivers.
The left lane merge is slightly quicker than the right lane merge, in part because not everyone is an unethical merger. Yet it is more irksome to drive in the left lane, because you feel, correctly, that people are taking advantage of you (unless you are an unethical merger yourself, which I am not).
In recent times, I have switched my choice to the right lane.
Cheap Talk 
2 comments
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February 7, 2012 at 2:50 pm
David
Can’t we just assume that all lanes move at equal speed so whichever lane we choose is as fast as any other and it doesn’t matter when we merge? 🙂
More seriously, I still follow the convention of Cowen’s “moral mergers” and merge as soon as I see that I’ll need to do so. I know that this is inefficient, but getting other drivers angry at me has other costs which can sometimes be quite high.
February 7, 2012 at 6:26 pm
NP
Tom Vanderbilt, in his book Traffic, suggests that the far left style creates the least traffic. Consider if they had merged into the middle earlier, typically where someone (semi?) has left a void. That lane will be carrying twice the intended cars and the far left will have a long, empty space that will invite exactly the behavior avoided in this scenario: filling the lane. Would anybody feel it more fair if the Gallows Road cars hopped the median so as not to ‘cut in line’ and merge ‘late’?
Of course, as Vanderbilt & many others acknowledge, social biases and local perception mitigate our queuing behaviors to inefficient levels.