http://www.amasci.com/amateur/traffic/t
The animated gifs are informative but a bit annoying; don't let them "drive" you out of the site, it's interesting stuff.
There is one "big picture" item that is missing: the total capacity of the road. If a road can only carry 100 cars per minute per lane, it doesn't matter how people drive if 1000 cars per minute want to use that section of road. In that case you're going to have backups no matter what you do. The only solution in that case is to convince people to wait a while before taking their trip. The techniques outlined here work best when the road is nearing its capacity but is not yet at capacity.
I guess you could argue that delaying your trip is just an extreme form of friendly merging behavior… ;-)
BTW, the idea behind on-ramp traffic lights is to space out the cars that are trying to merge (one half of the problem). The benefit of the lights is not obvious, so lots of people complain about them. Interestingly, Minnesota tried an experiment in 2001 where they turned off all the on-ramp traffic lights for several weeks. At that point it became obvious that the lights had been helping because traffic immediately got worse. So everybody voted to turn them back on and now traffic is back to where it was before.