A lane splitter for controlling transport belt lanes

[Zentay]

TL;DR

Implement a lane splitter building to give us better control over the individual lanes on transport belts

What ?

Add a lane splitter building 1x2 tiles in size. It's a specialized section of transport belt (like underground belt and splitter). It attempts to redistribute items between the lanes of the transport belt. The items from each input lane will be evenly distributed to both output lanes. If one output lane is blocked, all the inputs will be routed to the other output lane. A lane filter also has an output priority setting with a filter that works like that of a belt splitter.

The lane splitter is primarily a lane balancer but it also has many other uses. It's possible to replicate this functionality with existing belt splitters but the result is ugly and relatively large. A small lane splitter could be used in compact assembly lanes in ways that the belt splitter based solutions cannot.

Why ?

I feels like this is something the game is missing. Transport belts have two lanes but there are no specialized buildings to manipulate these lanes. Uneven drawing of items on belts is an annoying problem without good solutions. There would be many uses for a lane splitter.

[wobbycarly]

One could argue that balancing lanes and managing draw/output is part of puzzle side of the game...

[FuryoftheStars]

One could argue that balancing lanes and managing draw/output is part of puzzle side of the game...

^^ This. It’s not that difficult to do it via vanilla means that we need yet another buildable item to handle it for us.

Edit: There’s also a mod for that: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/LaneBalancer

[ssilk]

moved to won’t implement

There are many more suggestions about this. The reasons why this won’t be implemented is that it is part of the puzzle to find useful ways to use both sides of the lanes.
And there are lots of mods about this.