From my experience, the best way to tackle driving in London is in an unmarked white van. That way, everybody expects you to be randomly changing lanes, ignoring road signs etc, and they give you a wide berth.
I'm with you on the one lane - oh hold on, it's two lanes - argh, no, one lane again - oh wait, two lanes - no, one.... thing. I have NO idea what on earth possesses anyone to design a road like that.
Surely, ideally, IMNSHO, the number of lanes should only ever change at a junction. Lanes should peel off to or join on from other roads. There's a conspicuous example of this not happening on East Road, and it annoys me every time I use the road in that direction, because traffic has to merge for no good reason. A relatively simple fix might be to mark the right lane right-turn-only from the previous junction up to that point and put a traffic island about where my marker is.
It's true, that thing on East Road is annoying. I think it's the gratuitous merging that's the problem, though; I generally have no problem with additional lanes being split off other than at junctions if it's sensible. (Typically some distance before a junction, to prevent a queue of traffic trying to go one way from holding up the people going the other.)
If you think East Road is annoying, though, the point about London is that it's orders of magnitude worse. East Road does that once; the South Circular between the M4 and Wandsworth did it about ten times!
Except the one person who cut up daneel_olivaw on the North Circular when he was moving house in a hired van and at 40mph pulled across literally 2 inches from the front bumper. The problem with cars that aren't yours is that you can't find the buttons fast enough, notably the horn.
Because some of the bits of road aren't wide enough to have more than one lane each way, but the traffic density in London is increasingly too great for its road system to bear, and hence wherever possible they've added extra lanes for the extra cars to use (read: all but park on for hours on end) during rush hour.
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I'm with you on the one lane - oh hold on, it's two lanes - argh, no, one lane again - oh wait, two lanes - no, one.... thing. I have NO idea what on earth possesses anyone to design a road like that.
Surely, ideally, IMNSHO, the number of lanes should only ever change at a junction. Lanes should peel off to or join on from other roads. There's a conspicuous example of this not happening on East Road, and it annoys me every time I use the road in that direction, because traffic has to merge for no good reason. A relatively simple fix might be to mark the right lane right-turn-only from the previous junction up to that point and put a traffic island about where my marker is.
If you think East Road is annoying, though, the point about London is that it's orders of magnitude worse. East Road does that once; the South Circular between the M4 and Wandsworth did it about ten times!