Am I the only one deeply irritated that the left going lane has no arrows and no one is indicating left either?
This intersection really hurts my sense of order!My headcanon is that the right turning person’s blinker is the only one out of sync
Thanks, that idea has a certain beauty to it.
I will now adopt it and move closer to inner peace again!
They’re all BMWs…
Can’t be. Then there’d be no signals at all.
Ok, that explains a lot. I am actually very surprised BMW was allowed to implement it this way.
has no arrows
How do you know? They’d all be obscured by the cars.
Should be visible on the first panel, unless painted totally randomly out of sync to the right-pointing arrows.
But that would also trigger my sense of order, soooo… :-)
I don’t think you have to indicate left when it’s the only possible direction you can go
You do, because the other drivers cannot be expected to track whether that’s your only possibility.
I don’t think you have to indicate left when it’s the only possible direction you can go
But with no arrows on the ground, you could also go to the right.
Had to learn that the hard way some years ago, when a car standing on a arrow-less lane, unexpected by me, also turned left together with myself standing on the left-arrow-lane.
We then had a crash while merging lanes, and it was determined to be my fault entirely.So the comic also triggers a bit of PTSD for me… ;-)
Sounds like a fucked up intersection if two lanes merge into one during the turn. Usually they will be two lanes with a solid white to indicated not to switch lanes.
This is precisely why you always indicate. In the absolute worst case scenario, it’s redundant information. But it also indicates unambiguous intent even when the traffic pattern is confusing or unfamiliar.
You also need to indicate even when you think you are alone. Again, worst case scenario, nobody sees it. But on the off chance that your awareness is not perfect, it indicates unambiguous intent to anyone - including pedestrians - you might have not noticed.
Yes, it is a fucked up intersection, although the two lanes don’t merge into one.
But what you don’t realize there (because of coming out of a slight ditch) is that the target road on the left you are going to, actually has two parallel lanes.
Didn’t expect that at all, and the hinted broken lines on the ground are practically useless, as they have to connect 8 arriving lanes to all their possible counterparts in a chaotic way on a curved surface.
So I just headed to the right side of the left road (not realizing I thereby did a implicit change of lanes), while the car to my right was totally unexpectedly overtaking me from behind, starting from the unmarked lane I didn’t suspect to also optionally lead to the left…
Really fucked up situation for anyone not being local and accustomed to it.
Here, I fixed it. The person in the back row has their right blinker on so they can get into the left-turn only lane.
Some people don’t indicate when the lane they’re in can be used only to go one way. It’s not necessarily the best course of action, but you just sorta learn to deal with it
Maybe the arrows are covered by the cars.
Maybe the arrows are covered by the cars.
Not in the first panel.
If there were arrows, they should be visible in parallel to the arrows going to the right.
Just one more lane bro! That’ll get rid of the traffic bro!
Read a book a few months ago by Tom Vanderbilt called traffic that was an academic look at the titular traffic and it showed negative returns on adding lanes.
Can you summarize the gist of it? I keep seeing this claim and it is extremely non-intuitive.
Supposing it’s true, how is it we’ve magically arrived at the optimal number of lanes as of the uttering of the statement?
If it’s a basically linear function where the lowest traffic is near-zero lanes, is there an implication that mass transit would be built in tandem with lane reduction, or does everyone just get more miserable?
Edit: I’ll add that what I’ve heard is that more people choose to drive until the misery-equilibrium is reached. So roads will always be as busy as they are now because they are at their max tolerable level of drivability. That seems plausible for some roads and for some finite number of lanes, but not generally applicable.
Essentially you need all streets to be serviceable by trucks, ambulances, etc., and therefore the general minimum is 1 lane. As you add car infrastructure, it becomes relatively more convenient to drive to a destination than take other modes of transport. You are also typically investing in the car infrastructure at the expense of alternatives, a straight opportunity cost and a sort of spiralling trap, as development becomes more and more centred around the car.
Braess’s paradox outlines adding a route can actually worsen overall network flow, and more broadly, new capacity just attracts new drivers until congestion returns to roughly where it started. Suboptimalities like the accordion effect are compounded as more traffic is added to the system.
Induced demand doesn’t imply the current number of lanes is optimal, just that expansion tends to be self-defeating.
Lane reduction alone would just increase misery, so the answer is redirect road space into transit, which absorbs displaced drivers at higher capacity. Otherwise it’s just misery.
I have a civil engineering degree with a focus on transport but never really used it for that, so this is something that I was taught, but had over a decade to devolve more into opinion.
You’d be surprised by how widely applicable it is, it works for virtually any road. Small city roads, highways, even residential streets.
There also isn’t a maximum number of lanes for this effect (well, there technically is, but it’s too large to be feasible) because cars are an extremely inefficient way of transportation, so they take up a lot of space.
Roads also become increasingly more expensive with each extra lane added, to the point where it becomes economically impossible to keep adding lanes. You also need to demolish buildings if the road was already too close to them. And the cost of the extra lane isn’t a one off, it also generates a running cost for repairs and inspections.
That money is better spent on making viable alternatives to cars, which actually will help traffic or even fix it.
Man, I could have saved like ten, or even fifteen seconds if the infrastructure was bigger.
Fantastic! You have a source?
Just look around.
I’m missing something? I was hoping for a link to the artist’s site
I think it was a joke: reality. The source is reality (around us).
Thanks Ants. Thants.
Even more annoying is when the green car leaves 2+ car lengths in front of it so the car behind can’t get into the turn lane if they need to.
More accurately…you’re the gray car wanting to turn right, but there is about 1/2-1/3 full car length in-between the black-green-white cars blocking the lane.
Prime candidate for a roundabout conversion.
Prime candidate for a bus
the nightmares of being European raised and trying to drive in Sarasota Florida’s roundabout system
The problem with roundabouts in the States is that a large percentage of drivers were never taught how to navigate a roundabout we were just given them with an implied “you’ll figure it out.”
I’m curious, what’s up with their roundabouts? Did a little searching on the web but only found some complaints about bad drivers.
people stopping on the r’bout, or trearing the entrance like a stop sign when theres no traffic, there being concrete dividers between lanes on some, some reduce the number of lanes from 2 to 1 halfway around them
I once got stuck in a bus like this. I was 20 minutes early for my connection. I missed my connection.
This reads like a Mitch Hedberg joke.
One time, I was late for the bus. The schedule said I was also 20 minutes early for the bus. It seems to me there is an obvious disagreement in the late-slash-early status of the bus. This cannot be good for traffic. Someone should do something about this.
Should have gotten on the right bus.
Man that’s good.
Mate I once missed a connection after it was delayed by 30min taking into account I was supposed tobe there 4h early…
This feels like an analogy for bike lanes.
No, the analogy for bike lanes would be what has been posted in another comment:
Right-turning cars typically have to cross the bikelanes going straight on, being one of the most dangerous situations for bicyclists and showing just how much of an afterthought the bikelanes are.
I was more thinking “The lane you’re supposed to be using is blocked by a bunch of parked cars”
I was at a traffic light with my support worker a few weeks ago, and this dumb fuck wasn’t on the sensor. He was sitting there for like ten minutes and wouldn’t move forward. My sw got out of that lane and went a different way. When we came back a couple mins later he was still there!
I was this person once. I think it was around 2015 I got stuck at a left turn light that puts you on the exit ramp to the interstate. I had only had my license for a year (if even that) and couldn’t tell where the sensor was. I’d keep getting blinking yellow lights, but traffic was a lot coming the other way so I could never go. I kept feeling as I scooted up I was getting too close to the cars crossing the intersection. I swear I was there for like 10 minutes or something.
Is that how traffic lights work in your area? Like they don’t cycle at all when you’re not on the sensor?
In theory, it’s an efficiency measure.
If there is a main road with higher volume, various side roads and no other bottleneck down the road that needs to be accounted for, it doesn’t make much sense to regularly interrupt main road traffic if nobody else needs the intersection. Conversely, depending on the interval, the side road drivers may have to wait a long while if they just barely missed a green.
Both of these cause traffic risk as well: Firstly that the main road driver who decides the red light is stupid and cuts off a side road driver they didn’t see, secondly that a side road driver who barely missed green doesn’t want to wait and tried to squeeze in before main road traffic picks back up.
Having the traffic lights switch on demand reduced those risks: Main road drivers who know that it’s red only if there’s gonna be some other car may be less reckless in running it, while side road drivers don’t have to wait as long and don’t feel the need to squeeze in.
Of course, it can’t ever remove the risks entirely because humans are what they are. It also depends on people actually driving up to the point where the sensor detects them. If they don’t know about the concept, they’ll have a hard time understanding what’s wrong. I was taught those things in driving school, but if it’s not a thing in your area or wasn’t when you learned, chances are nobody told you about it later.
depends a lot, but yes some lights are like that.
In my area the sensor turns on at (???) some time at night. Otherwise it always cycles. At night though, if you aren’t on the sensor it will skip.
There are two intersections like the right panel (but for left turns) on my route home from work and they are perpetually red (heavy traffic) on my navigation.
Why… Why do you need navigation to get home from work on the route that I presume you take every day?
Construction and traffic.
Some locales completely mismanage lane closure schedules, and for some reason 90% of people forget how driving works the moment the road is slightly moist.
I live in a big city that has unpredictable traffic and construction everyday, where a 5 minute difference in departure time can exponentially increase your travel time. I have at least 3 primary routes to get home, and navigation helps me pick the best route at the time I leave. It will also suggest detours if it finds a faster way enroute.
My spouse does the same (and I would also do, but I am a diehard bicyclist…).
The city’s unpredictable road repair schedules and other unforeseen circumstances (e.g. we recently were led around a huge area because they were defusing another bomb), makes always activating navigation the sensible choice.
Where exactly are those cars heading? There’s no road forward and only one lane to the right.
Turning left.
And not signaling. That tracks.
The comic definitely made it more confusing by choosing the main (non-intersecting) road of a T junction to illustrate this. In most countries, if this road splits into two lanes, the left-turning lane would split off, and the right-turning lane would go straight.
Edit: Apparently, this style of junction is more common in the US. In Europe, I’ve only seen this kind of junction on highways, but that would be without traffic lights and with a much longer turning lane.
I mean, it’s just a comic, not a rendering drawn by a traffic engineer. There’s plenty about it that isn’t quite right, but it gets the point across so there’s no need to nitpick it. (Source: I’m a traffic engineer, among other things.)
Going out on a limb to say it might have to do with the left-hand versus right-hand traffic differences?
This is why commuting on a motorcycle is so nice. In this situation I’d just filter through the cars and into the turn lane.
This would be much less of a problem if fewer people insisted on bringing their whole living room everywhere they go.
Americans have to have large cars because they are always 2 paychecks away from living in them
Here in 'Merika, it would only take two cars to block the turning lane, because half of these morons are oblivious and/or on their goddam phones.
I thought you were going to say because the cars are the size of tanks.
That too. Lots of Canyoneros out there.
Two cars or one stupidly oversized truck.
Can you help me understand the image? The turning lane here is foiled by more than two-ish cars, but that’s still better than the one car it would take to block the right turners otherwise.
Sure the person who posted this has no idea how to drive.
In the image, the 4 cars on the left are blocking the fifth car who wants to turn right even though there’s a green arrow. I’ve experienced this lots of times, but on left turns, and a lot of times because too many assholes in front of me aren’t pulled up as far as they can.
I mean, you also don’t want to pull ahead as close as possible. What if the vehicles infront of you need to back up, or an ambulance needs through. You don’t wanna be packed like sardines at an intersection.
But that car would be able to leave before a green light.
Is that right-angle traffic light a common thing? I’ve never seen one like that before.
Yes.
