vane171

Well, it would just shift the melee three hundred meters back, instead of the last hundred or fifty meters.

For example, cross country ski races have such lanes quite naturally but the dirty work happens in the strategic selection which lane you will go into. You cross the finish space to block others and do dirty work before you enter the lanes. You aim to select not the lane that would take you fastest to the finish but the lane that your opponent breathing on your back is trying to aim for or would be trying to. That's where the race is won or lost. Of course, in skiing you don't get broken bones or anything life threatening, but the 'mechanics' of it are the same.

In ski racing, you are (mostly) pressed by the snow conditions to use one of those premade deep tracks in the finishing space which means you don't see somebody finishing right next to side barriers. I don't know much about race track, my cross country skiing example I think provides closer example to what it would be like in bike racing. I think those lanes would make those last meters more dull. After all, drafting is a win or lose difference in bike racing.

Maybe on this logic and safety mind set, drafting should be completely forbidden all during a race because it is the chief accident causing or at minimum contributing factor in majority of accidents. No peloton tight bunch, make everybody keep some minimum distance from the rider in front of them...

And the suggestion to make the finishing space barriers two meters high, I can only laugh, the guy is mad or even f mad. Last time in discussing those barriers, I suggested to make them interlocking or at least interconnect them with some ties, and cover them with continuous strip of heavy duty plastic sheet on which advertising banners can be directly printed or affixed. No sticking out barrier feet should be a matter of course. Those feet are relic of time when barriers were used to separate demonstrators from onlookers, for example, and in such use, they were fine.