Stoneage Ramblings

By John R. Stone

What do you think about turning right at a red light? Or what do you think about those left turn signals in larger cities where everybody waits while the left turners do their thing?

A couple of recent things made me think about these actions.

The right turn on red makes sense if drivers really stop and look before turning. A week or two ago I was walking up Minnesota Avenue heading east and stopped in front of the bakery, pushed the pedestrian button and started watching for the signal to tell me I could go across Franklin Street.

Just as the signal told me I could go, a large pickup truck quickly came up the parking lane just as I was stepping off the curb. He’d cut around the other cars in line at the stop light. I saw him coming and jumped back. He never saw me. He was looking to his left to see if he could pull out in the traffic lane. Needless to say he was in the crosswalk at the time.

I remembered that while reading an article in the STrib last week about some safety people wanting to eliminate right turn on red for that exact reason. The article said that Washington D.C. had just passed an ordinance that will eliminate the right turn on red business in 2025. (Don’t ask me why 2025 and not 2024, it must be a Washington thing.) The whole safety issue is making it safer for pedestrians and bicyclists.

Generally as far as right turn on red down town in Glenwood makes sense to me. The line of southbound traffic on Franklin Street entering the intersection with Minnesota Avenue can get long and can take a while to clear especially if there are left turners coming from the opposite direction. Franklin Street is not wide enough for a special left turn lane. Even so I’m not thrilled about people using what is a parking lane to drive in.

Right on red only makes sense if drivers do stop and look before they turn.

The left turn issue was something that came up on Sunday morning radio and it was related to saving gas.

The theory was that while left turn lanes may help the left turners, straight ahead drivers are sitting at idle burning lots of gas and sending lots of CO2 into the atmosphere. There could be 40 or 50 cars at a major intersection sitting and idling while 10 to 20 left turners from either direction do their thing.

In fact the radio person said the left turn signal should be eliminated entirely and be replaced by multiple right hand turns in order to save polluting gases and also be a little safer.

UPS and FedEx both have policies that reduce left hand turns. An article about the UPS program says it saves about 10 million gallons of gas a year. Some studies have shown that it can also be safer, right hand turners are involved in fewer accidents, and that makes sense because the driver is not crossing a lane of traffic coming from the opposite direction.

The TV show Mythbusters actually tested the gas savings with a truck and confirmed that a truck will use less gas making right turns because traffic moves more swiftly, there is less idling time, and fewer stops that can more than offset the slightly longer distance.

So the folks on the radio show figured we could save many millions of gallons of gas, and have almost an instantaneous reduction in green house gas emissions, if we just made regular drivers turn on right as well and got rid of the special left turn lights.

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As long as I am on pedestrians and automobile drivers and turns, I’m not sure the pedestrian walking paths marked across streets are very well respected by drivers. And in some cases I can understand why.

There are places where, if you’re driving a car, you cannot see up the street if you stop short of the marked pedestrian path. Once or twice a week I come up to an intersection on foot to find a car sitting in the pedestrian path, the driver busy looking left to see if he or she can enter the street safely.