There’s a street in my town that outgrew the original design. It’s basically one travel lane in each direction, but with wide shoulders on both sides. During busy hours, traffic backs up. When a car needs to make a left turn all the other cars behind it are supposed to wait.
That doesn’t happen tho. What does happen is this: if a car in front of you is stopped waiting to turn left, the cars behind them will go around them using the shoulder to continue going straight. All cars do this including me when I’m in that spot.
The problem comes in when I’m the one trying to turn left from the opposite direction. Technically, the cars traveling on the should don’t have the right of way since they’re supposed to wait for the turning car in front of them to go and then its their turn to go straight or turn.
When I’m the one needing to turn I usually wait for a gap in the true lane and then make my turn. Almost every time, someone going straight in the shoulder opposite me lays on the horn like I just cut them off.
So AITA?
Edit to add: I only turn when there’s also another turning car in the opposing lane.
this isn’t an asshole problem, this is a road design problem. if i had the pick an asshole, the city, i guess? NAH. you need a roundabout
Or lanes for left turning traffic so the lane straight ahead doesn’t back up. A roundabout would have the advantage of traffic having to slow down, so might be preferable depending on the junction.
The thing about right of way is you’re not allowed to _take_ the right of way, the other person must _yieid_ the right of way.
If they don’t yield, you’re not allowed to just take it because it’s supposed to be your turn.
Exactly.
Also what good is right of way if your car is wrecked and you might be in hospital or dead. Yeah… you won. Or did you? Because I’d say you didn’t.
And you might not even get a payout if it’s established you drove recklessly since you know the cars are passing and don’t see you and you still took your turn because “it’s my right of way”. Right of way or not, your own behaviour will determine if you get part responsibility for an accident or not and if you could have prevented it but didn’t. (At least outside of North America anyway).
I don’t really know how to quantify this one, but I’m going to go with NTA. They’re not supposed to be doing that, so you have the right of way, and they should be waiting.
However…there is some responsibility on your part in this. If you know that people are going to be going straight from the oncoming shoulder, you should be acting accordingly. It’s ridiculous, I know. I worked in auto insurance (very very briefly, by no means an expert) and the company I worked for used the “prudent person” rule to determine what we would pay. If a “prudent person” was in your situation, knowing that there were oncoming cars, would they continue to make their left turn, just because they legally can? In the event of a collision, this particular agency would not have paid the full amount in damages, even if you were determined to be not at fault by the police. I’m not justifying either way, I’m just sharing 🙂
As I side note, does anyone else find geckos really cute?
I don’t understand. The only way an oncoming car on the shoulder would be an issue is if the true oncoming lane is also turning left, right? So you both turn left in front of each other and there’s no need to cut around on the shoulder, no one is waiting.
Exactly. But the turning car opposite me is usually yielding to the cars passing me on the shoulder. So that’s why traffic is building up behind them. It causes traffic to back up on both sides.
Like I said it’s a design that has outgrown the original plan.
Just for clarification: it’s a 4-way intersection/turning into parking lots or side streets and you’re turning left, you wait for someone in the oncoming lane to be turning left so you can both go, but someone behind that oncoming car passes them on the right using the shoulder?
If that’s the case NTA, they’re breaking the law. That situation is the exact reason passing on the right on onelane roads is illegal in the majority of the US. They would 100% be at fault, but just remember right of way doesn’t matter at the hospital
Yes that’s exactly the case. But someone is ALWAYS turning left on this road. I don’t ever have to wait.
The traffic behind them ALL treat the shoulder like another lane, but it’s not another lane. It’s the shoulder. So it’s not like just one car as you describe. It’s car after car after car and if you don’t go eventually the light turns red so you will never get the chance to turn unless you wait for a gap (like I usually do) and floor it.
It’s annoying and they really need to do something about it but it’s probably a major project.
I don’t understand. Just keep yourself and others safe. Guess make complaints to the proper authorities
this doesn’t really feel like a clean “right of way” problem.
it feels like a system that’s been living in a grey zone for so long that people stopped reacting to the rule and started reacting to flow = what keeps things moving.
once that happens, “technically correct” stops lining up with how risk is felt in the moment…..
law says one thing, behaviour says another, and the brain follows behaviour.
the shoulder traffic isn’t legal, sure, but it *is* predictable inside that pattern. not safe – predictable.
and that’s where the friction comes from.
You’ve basically got {written rules + emergent behaviour + bad road design} all colliding in one spot.
drivers aren’t disagreeing about intent. they’re optimising for different models of the same BROKEN setup!
Why the horns then? because one side is playing the rulebook, the other is playing the flow. and both think they’re “obviously right”.
EDIT: none of this feels solvable at the individual-driver level. once infrastructure forces improvisation, conflict is kind of baked in. P.S: councils love pretending this is a “driver attitude” issue, but yeah… that’s a whole other rant.
NTA but don’t be surprised if/when you get hit.
I’ve been doing this for ten years now. I have it down to a science. There is usually a distracted driver that is on their phone and creates a large gap wide enough for me to get through. They are also the ones who get mad and blow the horn because I dared take advantage of the gap they created.
I not just driving into oncoming traffic Willy Nilly.