I miss right on red every time I drive outside the US. Right on red is a blessing, and it makes a lot of sense. Why would anyone want to take it away?!
As a driver, I love right-on-red. As a pedestrian, I hate it -- it generally results in drivers stopping past the stop line, or not stopping at all as they roll into their right turn, and many times they aren't even looking to the right for pedestrians, they are only looking to the left for traffic.
As much as I love the right-on-red as a driver, I think it should be ended because drivers aren't responsible enough to use it safely. Perhaps when (if?) self-driving cars are ubiquitous it can be revisited.
There are drivers that don't check for pedestrians. Then there are pedestrians who jaywalk blithely like Mary Poppins, sometimes in the dark, sometimes in black wear. In both cases, the driver is generally at fault.
IMO, pedestrians are obligated to have some sense of self-preservation, even though in theory drivers should fully accommodate all pedestrian antics. Is it really too much to ask for pedestrians to look left before crossing?
>Is it really too much to ask for pedestrians to look left before crossing?
Yes, is that even a real question? A pedestrian with a walk signal should be able to cross without looking for traffic. They shouldn't need to anticipate that the car approaching a red light is going to just roll into the crosswalk without stopping.
I am extremely wary of drivers. Years ago--before cell phones were ubiquitous--I saw a car around here start to pull out to a fire truck, one that had its lights and sirens goin.
Having said that, pedestrian wariness can carry one only so far.
If a child is old enough to be crossing the street without an adult present (holding their hand), then they're old enough to be looking both ways before crossing.
That was a kindergarten lesson, and in my experience, those kids tend to be better about it than most people are when they're older.
If they're not going to do that, what is stopping them from just wandering into a road nowhere near a traffic light anyway?
My own child is a runner and until she was six or so it was honestly terrifying to go outside with her. I want to live somewhere letting go of a four year old's hand isn't a death sentence. Incidentally this is what Anne hidalgo says she wants for Paris and it seems like a useful heuristic.
When I was a cyclist, at least when there were multiple lanes, I'd hop to the left of cars turning right.
When there is one lane, you do sort of have to pay attention to blinkers.
Well designed bike lanes, where they exist, typically already follow this pattern. If you're going straight it's pretty silly to be to the right of traffic that is turning right.
Check your local laws to make sure YOU actually know the law. I get yelled at in Colorado for obeying the law on my bike to a T. Stop signs operate as yields, red lights as stop signs. Why? Because as a cyclist the most dangerous time is when I’m stopped. I can see around far better than you can in a car and can safely get through stop signs and red lights in ways you cannot. Get hit a couple times by people turning right on red right into you and you might start to get it. The relative danger is also laughable, would you equate the danger of me on my bike running a red to a Ram 3500 running a red light?
Thinking about the number of times a driver rolled through a stop sign or red light while looking at incoming traffic (or their phone) DURING THE TURN infuriates me.
If it's really pedestrian fatalities we're concerned about, we should be implementing red right-facing arrows, which are on when the walk light is on.
Right on red, unless that arrow is on. Perhaps a blinking yellow arrow for when it isn't, just to avoid the ambiguity.
Or, when you're walking into the road, maybe make sure that drivers nearby see you. I played Ingress and Pokemon Go for years, in the city, at night, for years. Perhaps it's that I knew it put me at heightened risk so I paid more attention, but I really have a hard time understanding why people think that drivers are the only ones who need to pay attention when they're in the street.
Sure, except Americans may also have a weird obsession with driving that makes them oblivious to pedestrians, whereas many other nations may be more aware of pedestrians and thus have fewer fatalities per capita. I have no data to back up such a statement. Just anecdotal experiences.
Because it leads to dead pedestrians. I walk a lot and right on red is a curse, drivers often only look left for traffic instead of right for pedestrians before turning. Coupled with hoods so high you can't even see kids or short people walking in front of your vehicle it's very dangerous.
The last two vehicles which nearly ran me over in a crosswalk have been pickup trucks... Not sure if they have shitty visibility or if pickup drivers are less likely to conceptualize there might be pedestrians....
I think there are two bigger problems here: people turning when there are pedestrians and the car size inflation. These are not inherent problems with right on red.
I recall a particular intersection where a two-way turns into a one-way that has crosswalks on all sides.
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A driver traveling north receives a green right arrow instead of a green globe. I assume this is to make it extra clear not to proceed straight, but then is it technically illegal for a pedestrian to use the rightmost crosswalk?
A pedestrian won't be given the the walk signal while the turn light is green. I'm not sure if this feature would ever appear on an intersection with pedestrian signals.
There is very little evidence that right on red creates any sort of danger to pedestrians. Yes, it's annoying to cyclists and pedestrians, but we'd be better off investing in many other traffic calming and pedestrian safety tactics.
It's tempting for drivers to drive towards an intersection looking left - the direction their threat will come from - and keep speed to turn right on red if no traffic is coming. What they wont be looking for is the cyclist or pedestrian in their path. The faster they go the more attentive they need to be on that left window.
I always liked the idea of slip lanes, as then you could check first for a conflict with a pedestrian (looking left and right), then cross that point and worry about a conflict with a car or bike (looking far left). But some people are now trying to remove them because they're worried they can cause drivers to speed through the pedestrian crossing.
If you make a small dedicated right-turn lane it will signal to pedestrians to watch out for RTOR. If you don't, I guess you have to ticket people who don't stop at the red. I would naturally stop.
Of course, 19/20 intersections never have pedestrians anyway.
Please include a trillion dollar electro-shock driver retraining program in this package.
For some considerable subset of Americans the roundabout is an indecipherable creature that induces fear an panic. For a bit I lived in a more modern US neighborhood filled with them, including some larger ones on the main streets. Some people treat an empty roundabout like a stop sign coming up to it. Others panic and stop inside the 'about waiting for entering traffic. Then you get the occasional rebel that demands to go the wrong way.
I do like the roundabouts, but there are a lot of people still untrained in their ways.
In the US, sometimes it's the driver's fault, sometimes the roundabout is put in a nonsensical location and is actually confusing. I think they're just trying to be fancy in those cases.
Like here's one I still remember from living in Mountain View. https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3911031,-122.0805526,3a,75y,... Roundabout with straight/left traffic lights (not the right turn lights sometimes seen on large roundabouts in Europe), an oxymoron. Someone drives through a green as usual and bam, hit by someone still clearing the roundabout. Is right on red legal here too? Extra islands also add to the confusion, making people U-turn wrongly. Lots of foot traffic and peds don't know when to safely walk in this situation. Having tons of signs there just adds to the overload.
Two-way stop signs with a roundabout. Who has right of way here? "CROSS TRAFFIC DOES NOT STOP," but roundabout normally means to yield to whoever's already in it: https://www.google.com/maps/place/37%C2%B023'14.3%22N+122%C2... Can they just remove the crap in the middle?
Or most commonly, zero stop signs but the roundabout is so tiny that it's unclear whether or not two cars can safely use it at the same time.
Pedestrians already have the right of way. If drivers ignore that, how will banning right on red help? Replacing one honored rule with another rule seemed illogical, bad drivers are going to be bad drivers either way.
Because the "honored rule" isn't honored well enough, as "about 57% of car crashes involving pedestrians happened because drivers failed to yield to people in all intersections", quoting one of the listed study results, and "crashes increased by more than 20% in states that allowed RTOR" quoting another.
Some rules are more honored than others.
Consistent rules are more likely to be followed than ones that differ by state and even by city.
Rules which require more situational awareness - you may turn right if the light red, traffic is clear from the left, no people are in the crosswalk, and no one from the right is about to cross - are harder to follow than ones which require situational awareness - you may not move if the light is red.
Rules with personal choices are more subject to peer pressure. You aren't required to turn right on red, but if you don't, you may get honked at. This may encourage people to make the wrong decision, and turn even when not clear. If RTOR is illegal, honking is no longer peer pressure but only an "I am an asshole" indicator.
Depending on were I am in the US, it's common to see most drivers on the highways or interstates doing 10-25mph above the speed limit. Sticking to the speed limit often leaves you getting honked at, having drivers riding your tail, etc. Should we keep decreasing the speed limit until people follow the rules?
> Rules with personal choices are more subject to peer pressure.
A society with rules designed to remove personal choice for fear of peer pressure sounds absolutely miserable. I would never want to live in a world where rules are created by a higher authority with the specific goal of removing my ability to make decisions because it has been decided that its better for me that way.
It sounds like you are asking how basic lawmaking works. You must surely know that lines are changed all the time. I don't know what more you expect from me which you don't already know or can get from an intro civics course.
> Should we keep decreasing the speed limit until people follow the rules?
That seems like a totally different topic. You commented that "Replacing one honored rule with another rule seemed illogical." I pointed out why that high-level characterization can be logical.
The devil is in the details, and the balance of factors concerning RTOR may be far different than the laws on speed limits.
Besides, the article points out the laws changed from the honored rule of no RTOR to a new rule. Using your characterization, that change was also illogical, right? Even though the article points out how it was to save fuel during the gas crisis.
Now that cars are much more efficient, it is certainly logical to ask if those those savings are still worthwhile.
> I would never want to live in a world where rules are created by a higher authority with the specific goal of removing my ability to make decisions because it has been decided that its better for me that way.
How is that relevant? I said was that it's one of several factors to consider when changing a rule, in order to decide if the rule change was logical.
I did not say it was or should be "the specific goal."
I assume you do not generally [1] run a red light whenever you see the cross-traffic is clear, even though that law was created by a higher authority with the specific goal of removing your ability to make a decision that would be allowed with a blinking red light.
I assume you also don't often drive when it's likely your blood-alcohol level is beyond the legal limit, even though that law has also removed your ability to make the decision if you are sober enough to drive safely, justified on the belief that it's better for you that way.
How do you manage to live in a world where one-way streets have severely restricted your ability to go in one direction?
I could go on, but I think you understand that I simply don't see how your comment has any bearing on the topic, except to understand that you are strongly against a whole lot of traffic laws that most people think are reasonable.
[1] Yes, there are exceptional cases when it's legal to run a red light, like if you are on a motorcycle, the traffic detector appears to be broken and you've been sitting there for minutes while no other traffic is present. https://www.startribune.com/the-drive-what-to-do-if-traffic-... . I believe it's still illegal if you are in a car, but it's an affirmative defense the judge will likely accept - same as if your passenger had a heart attack and you are heading straight to the ER.
Because there's no enforcement of this, and "gee I didn't see them" is accepted without question by police, prosecutors, and the public?
Banning right on red is called a "protected" crossing - the driver has to very visibly violate the law (in a way that can even be enforced in an automated way) to even be in the situation with the pedestrian. That is substantially more protection and it works.
> crashes increased by more than 20% in states that allowed RTOR.
They also explained some of the mechanics: truck drivers don't see the bikers, SUV drivers don't see the pedestrians, other drivers press you to clear the intersection quicker than is safe etc.
It makes it more likely that bad drivers will be caught. It's much better to catch a bad driver before they run over a pedestrian rather than after.
Many drivers believe that getting to their destination is more important than yielding to pedestrians and minor traffic laws. It's important to enforce those minor traffic laws before that behavior/mindset leads to a fatality.
It will help by forbidding drivers from turning right under ANY circumstances. That would be a change of conditions, and you can't say for certain that drivers won't change their behavior if it happens.
One of the nice things about Seattle and WA traffic law is that you can turn LEFT on red when going from a one-way street onto another one way street. In addition to right on red, of course.
Seattle is starting to add "no turn on red" to many intersections, which is good in my book as a frequent pedestrian. People ignore them though and run the lights.
Yea, having to pay attention to the "world outside my brain" is such a distraction from my true identity!
Instead of making it all worse by allowing traffic to flow more often, let's introduce stop lights in the middle of blocks so there's more equality in who get's to stop being distracted by the outside universe, and instead focus on our true selves, which of course involves our online accounts with large corporations.
Driving is such a distraction from being on the phone...
I'd be OK getting rid of it IF we mandate smarter lights everywhere. That or get rid of lights where possible altogether in favor of some type of roundabout.
Where I live now is a hellish mix of 4 way stop signs, and lights that seem to be on a 60 to 120 second timer no matter what. It's infuriating driving in the evening, not another car in sight, and getting caught at a redlight for more than a minute. A lot of people here seem to run red lights, and I think that's a huge reason why.
Getting rid of RTOR is such a low hanging fruit, we should absolutely do it. Currently our roads prioritize vehicle speed over all other considerations.
I don't think that's something the roads prioritize. That's something that the drivers choose to do. A better word might be that roads afford or allow drivers to prioritize speed. I've been in cities where drivers don't prioritize speed. It's nice driving in such cities. People are civil on the road. It's really nice.
It was absolutely the intention for traffic/urban planners to prioritize motorist travel times, which is why you see long delays on "beg buttons" at intersections, or making peds wait for a cycle or more of the lights, and so on.
Some cities like Cambridge, MA integrate a default pedestrian cycle at all phases of the lights, sync the lights to not provide a "green wave", and have an extensive arrangement of one-way streets to discourage drivers from using residential roads as shortcuts.
Instead of penalizing those nice cities with RTOR rules designed for reckless cities, we should step up enforcement in areas where the drivers choose to speed, until they also become nice.
"Nice cities" ? Mind elaborating? Sorta sounds like youre implying some cities are just 'nice' based on like personal choice and not other variables like urban design. If so thats naive...
It doesn't matter if your city is nice because it only has cobblestone streets, because it's populated by the Amish, or because police lasers zap speeders. Once it becomes nice you should get to reap the benefit by enjoying safe right turn on red.
Vehicle speed is a valid priority. The time we would collectively lose waiting at red lights likely far outstrips the years of life lost from hitting pedestrians.
Camera technology will soon be able to detect pedestrians flawlessly, eliminating most of the risk of RTOR. We need to make sure not to ban RTOR before that happens, because it will be too hard to unban it.
Super interesting that you equate waiting at a red light, with time to pause and breathe, as lost time in the same way not being alive anymore is indeed lost time.
You might be horrified to learn that human life is assigned a monetary value in social considerations. You can't run a large society successfully on feelings.
There is an economic cost to lost life, and there is an economic cost to people waiting in traffic, and it may be very well that the latter exceeds the former in this case (though I have not done that calculation).
Holy cow thats both extremely inaccurate and messed up. This sort of reductive economic realism is why people like you fail to understand sufficiently complex topics, like ecology, society, basically anything that isn't currently effectively quantified by the 'market.' You treating an 'economic' cost like that, as if its some cosmic truth whose validity comes from beyond humans, is just as nuts as any religious cultist.
So out of curiosity, are Americans not taught to stop at a red light and check their right-side mirror and blind spot for cyclists or pedestrians before turning right on a red light? Because I certainly was taught that when I signed up for driving lessons? Just Americans don't do this?
It's certainly taught but the practical reality is that a lot of people are very sloppy and careless in driving. As a frequent pedestrian in big cities that do allow right-on-red it's extremely common to see cars that try to make a quick right turn immediately at the same moment that a pedestrian crosswalk "Walk" sign comes on, risking running over a pedestrian. When the reality and law is that the car has to wait for the pedestrians to cross and then make its right on red after they have cleared the intersection.
I think the main reason why right on red is banned in NYC is for pedestrian safety and traffic flow reasons.
I imagine the insane traffic volume in NYC also incentivizes more aggressive driving. There's a higher trip time penalty for not making the turn, compared to a city with less jammed roads. This matters for people who need to make appointments or any other driving where time matters (does anyone still offer pizza delivery in 30 minutes or it's free?).
I live in Boise, Idaho. I can confidently say that the behavior described is not unique to NYC scale. I don't have the context to say it's not worse there, but I can confidently say that license plates coming from more rural counties don't appear any less aggressive or careless than local plates.
There's a vast difference between what is taught and what is actually done. Everyone (well almost everyone) knows what they are supposed to do as drivers, but few do it.
The biggest insight I got from Vision Zero is that the focus on dangerous drivers is deeply flawed. All you are doing is doubling down on that flawed viewpoint, seemingly to justify your disdain of bankers, without really understanding the consequences your argument.
Roads and traffic laws did not appear by magic. They are created by people, and the design of those roads and laws, and the construction of those roads, contributes to any crashes. Some intersections are dangerous due to bad design, and it's possible to design a less dangerous intersection. We haven't made all intersections as safe as we can because it's expensive and a whole lot of people prefer shorter drive times and the increase in danger over safer intersections.
Using your logic, any city with a dangerous intersection - effectively all of them - are already committing TREASON, and the voters who authorized the bond sales which paid for them are accessories to crime who should be subject to criminal liabilities.
When the vast majority of adults are treasonous criminals who control state power, it's no longer treason or criminal. The large majority of the traitors and criminals who founded the US never faced British criminal punishment for their actions against the Crown. Calling George Washington a traitor will make you few friends in the US, yet that is what you are doing here.
The only exception is maybe next to bike lanes.