You merge as soon as you can BEFORE you hit the merge point where you are forced to merge. When you wait until you hit that point you have caused a huge traffic back up. If people would merge when they saw the first sign to merge things would run a lot more smoothly.

So the people causing the problem are the ones that pass up everyone that has already merged like they were supposed to but think to themselves, "I'm going to pass up all of these people that have already merged so I can get 10 cars ahead!"

I LOVE it when a trucker blocks both lanes so that people can't sneak by the people merging correctly.