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It’s time for a nationwide ban of right-on-red turns

The driver inches into the crosswalk, watching the oncoming traffic to his left and waiting for a gap to appear. He finally spots one and accelerates into the turn, without realizing that a pedestrian on his right has just stepped off the curb, beckoned by a green “Walk” sign.

Hi, I’m the pedestrian. It me. 🤗

“Right-on-red” is one of those things that Americans have decided is an innate, natural right. If you even hesitate as a driver in a right turn lane in LA, you get honked at. But its fraught with danger for pedestrians and drivers alike.

Too often I’m walking through the city and a driver never even bothers looking in my direction as they make a right on red. Too often I can touch the side of their vehicle as they pass by (turns out, people don’t like their vehicles being touched, but I see this as a them problem). Too often I get the leading pedestrian “go” signal as a driver barrels through the crosswalk after I’ve left the curb. Too often a driver makes actual eye contact as I’m walking and hits the gas, assessing the value of my life to be significantly lower than their right to turn right on red and the perceived fractions of seconds it saves them.

You won’t find a legitimate study that shows it saves drivers any measurable amount of time. You won’t find one that shows it prevents vehicle congestion meaningfully. And you won’t find one that fails to show how dangerous it is for everyone.

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California drivers kill thousands each year, but murder charges are rare

In the Netherlands, you are considered legally liable for your actions as a driver, unless you can prove otherwise. In the States, it’s up to the pedestrian or cyclist you kill to prove your liability, making it a bit harder for anyone to be held accountable.

If you want to murder someone in California, simply hit them with a car and tell the police, “I didn’t see them”. I am being extreme to prove a point, but I’m not convinced it’s an exageration. We call it, preemptive exoneration, and we participate in it as a society because we’ve not done the work to enable modes of transportation other than the private automobile.

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Traffic Engineers Must Put Safety Over Driver Throughput

But they do the definitional opposite of that.

No other branch of civil engineering tolerates this level of system failure. In any other field, if engineers knew that systems would fail catastrophically about 30 times this year and knew when, where, and why that was most likely to happen, they would be required to intervene or shut everything down. And if they didn’t, there would be serious professional consequences: firing, fines, loss of license, and, depending on how egregious the infraction, criminal penalties.

The only professional pseudo-science that also gets taken seriously and makes less intellectual sense than traffic engineering might be parking minimums. My occasional tarot reading by a friend is significantly more science-based than the intellectual work behind parking minimums.