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Comment by wffurr | Hacker News Reader

Every time I end up on a five lane road with the center turning lane and tons of curb cuts and cross streets and abutting parking lots, I remind myself that it's one of the most dangerous places I am likely to be in.

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Here in Austin Texas, we have lovely signs to remind you of your imminent crash!

http://austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/Sign%201.JP...

I don’t remember ever seeing that sign. Where is it posted?

I've seen them while cruising S Pleasant Valley, but there are a number of road sections where they're posted: http://austintexas.gov/page/high-injury-roadways

I love the "zero excuses" at the bottom. "now that we informed you of the danger, anything bad happening is entirely your fault and the city can't be held liable for its bad decisions"

I guess it might come across that way, but I was happy to see the "Vision Zero" thing in the bottom left. Vision Zero has been a very successful road traffic policy in Sweden.

> Vision Zero is based on an underlying ethical principle that "it can never be ethically acceptable that people are killed or seriously injured when moving within the road transport system." In most road transport systems, road users bear complete responsibility for safety. Vision Zero changes this relationship by emphasizing that responsibility is shared by transportation system designers and road users.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero

I don't think any American city or police department knows what vision zero is. They frequently include the words "vision zero" in their plans or posts, but then car crash deaths continue as normal or even increase.

Using Los Angeles as an example:

https://ladotlivablestreets.org/programs/vision-zero

https://laist.com/news/transportation/2020-traffic-deaths-lo... for the graphic "Traffic violence in Los Angeles" showing the increase since Vision Zero was adopted.

Then you have enforcement issues like jaywalking laws, the wording and culture around collisions and referring to them as "accidents", etc.

The entire country was REbuilt (US cities were not always like this) around the car. Until that changes, no city will reach Vision Zero.

Same in NYC. There was some progress for a few years, but then traffic deaths rebounded. The pandemic gets some blame, though it’s a poor excuse for weak leadership and the trend started before that. “Vision Zero” has become the “thoughts and prayers” of traffic deaths.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/nyregion/traffic-deaths-n...

Our equivalent in Australia is a Black Spot:

https://www.snowyvalleys.nsw.gov.au/News-Media/Brungle-Road-...

Slightly different, as the Black Spot Program signs are on former crash sites that have already had improvements made.

We used to run this program in Poland too, but new signs haven't been installed since 2003.

Why not Red or White Spot?

> one of the most dangerous places I am likely to be in.

i dont know how widely this turn of phrase is used, but where i grew up in the US, we called the middle turn lane in a 5 lane road the suicide lane.

I've also called it that for as long as I can remember, and it's probably helped me drive more defensively around that lane. Drivers misuse it all the time.

Likewise in Ontario. Strong term, but gets the point across. I also once saw a dump truck with stickers on either side of the tailgate. On the left, "passing side." On the right, "suicide." Had a big impact on my driving habits... I never, ever pass on the right.

Unfortunately the majority of people don't seem to understand they're not allowed to pass on the right (and they never get pulled over for it).

If slower traffic kept right, there’d be a lot less passing on the right. (If you’re getting passed on the right regularly, you might consider your own lane discipline as well as that of those passing you.)

Yes, this is also true, but I think the bigger problem is just speeding. People on the left are usually moving faster than people on the right or middle, on average, but some people want to go 20-30 mph over the speed limit. Normally I'd pull to the right so they can pass, but by the time I start doing that they're already starting to change lanes too!

True. If you take a highway that people feel is reasonable and prudent to drive at 75-85 mph and post it as 55, people will drive 20-30 mph over. I think the problem is more likely the 55 signage in that case.

That might make sense for dump trucks because they're bulky and have poor visibility, but what's the increased risk of passing on the right? The only thing I can think of is marginally worse visibility because the right side is slightly further away from the driver's seat. However, I don't think that's enough risk to justify going out of your way to pass on the right. Having to change lanes to pass on the left carries its own risks.

On a 3+ lane road, it increases the risk of two people merging into each other as they both try to pass.

Some cars have a blind spot on their right. Also, the convention is passing on the left, so people are generally less aware of things going on on their right. Of course bad drivers are almost by definition unpredictable, but if some bad driver is going to absent mindedly merge into you, they will probably do it while you are on their right. In particular, distracted people whose texting has been interrupted by their GPS telling them to take the next exit...

In many countries, it's a hard rule that you need to pass on the left. Passing on the right is only allowed when it's a lane going in a different direction (like an exit), or traffic is moving very slowly (you don't want people changing lanes in a traffic jam to avoid passing on the right).

Going onto the IdiotsInCars subreddit, it's kind of shocking how commonplace it is for people to undertake other road users by speeding past in the slow lane. It's already more difficult to merge back into a slower lane because you have a much bigger blind-spot (and have to twist your neck a lot more to get a good look), so it doesn't make it any easier if you have to expect that people will be speeding to undertake you.

While "keep right except to pass" is technically the law here in Ontario, the de facto standard is that the middle lane is the cruising lane, the left is the passing lane, and the right is basically a second merging lane. This means that it is not uncommon to have stop-and-go traffic in the left two lanes while the right lane is still moving and mostly wide open. Drivers will frequently move right into the middle lane from the ramp even with no traffic in the right lane and not having sped up to the highway speed. It's an complete waste of resources.

Highways are a complicated graph problem I guess, which I'm not very good at, but I wouldn't be surprised if the true bottleneck was some offramp later. So, increasing the throughput of the road leading up to it shouldn't really improve things, right? And leaving rightmost lane less heavily populated might make it easier for cars to do the off/on ramp thing which might make things easier around the bottleneck.

I dunno. People pack in as tightly as possible around here and we still get traffic. I think it is just inevitable.

I hate it when my GPS on my second phone does this!

On a serious note, the overtake left thing (or right for those strange people driving on the wrong side) is a big reason German Autobahn is as safe as it is. Reckless idiots notwithstanding.

I wonder how much that specific road design cause FedEx to discourage left hand turns in their routes?

I think you're thinking of UPS, and IIRC the decision is mostly to reduce waiting time/idle fuel burn. (Most jurisdictions in the US allow right-on-red and that makes this even easier to justify.)

If I go somewhere often, I like to find the "chill route" that minimizes complex left turns, even if it takes a bit longer.

Same, I don't even mind if it takes a bit longer. I am more interested in stress free driving than getting there sooner.

The only other time I have heard that was during my driving test on small town California

Sounds like a derivative from a road style which has (mostly, thankfully) been abandoned: originally, “suicide lanes” designated the center lane of a 3-lane.

A 3-lane is a road design where you’ve got one lane in each direction, and a shared passing lane in the middle.

These used to be quite popular as they were not much more expensive than a 2-lane but allowed better throughput, however as density and speeds increased they became more and more deadly as they’d encourage trying to pass and high-speed frontal collisions.

They’re mostly gone now, replaced by either 2+2 or 2+1 (the latter is very popular in europe, it’s basically a 3-lane except there’s a hard barrier which regularly swaps the center lane’s direction to allow safe passing sections — or more rarely a 1+1 with a protected turn lane).

In Mexico there are still a good number of 3-lane roads where the middle lane is for passing in both directions. A close family friend died on one: head-on collision with a truck passing a truck on a curving mountain road. (He was an aggressive driver who got lucky for decades until one day he finally didn’t.) Truly horrible road design.

Middle shared turn lanes are quite safe though, though I don't have actual stats. It's very hard to hit someone in one because no one is driving more than 50 ft in one, and you're always coming to a stop to prepare for a turn. On busy streets they are usually a bit wider than a normal lane, and on 80 km/h highways, they are a full lane-and-a-half wide. On busier residential streets with lots of single family homes, they are a great alternative to two lanes in each direction, because they allow for separated bike lanes and left-turning cars don't block traffic flow. Many 50 km/h roads in my city have been converted like this.

You would never put one in a newly designed road, but when a road needs to be upgraded, they are a great solution.

I spent a summer in India in the late 1980s (Tamil Nadu). Going between cities, the roads were only partially paved. There were two dirt lanes, with a blacktop middle lane. The trucks would play a continuous game of "chicken", driving at each other until someone lost their nerve.

The newspaper had regular reports of truck "capsizings", where a truck would lose control and turn over. It was common for a truck to have laborers who would fill up the truck with some bulk product like dirt, then ride on the top to go to the destination, then unload it. When one of these trucks capsized, it was a major disaster.

I had to look up a 'center turning lane'. Is this[1] it? That looks incredibly dangerous.

[1]: https://www.wikihow.com/Use-the-Center-Turning-Lane

It is, but they’re more common on one travel lane each way streets.

When evaluating the danger of such a design, you have to consider the alternatives. You’re probably considering 3/4 head on collisions from drivers misjudging the turn. Those happen, but how many rear-end collisions are avoided?

The center turning lane isn't there to avoid rear end collisions, which are only problematic due to too-high speeds in a commercial area.

They are about improving throughput.

What makes them dangerous, particularly in the five lane configuration, is the poor visibility for crossing uncontrolled intersections of multiple traffic lanes.

Center turning with five lanes? wow, that's crazy...

The examples in the article show anywhere from 5 to 7 lanes. The outermost lanes in one of the 7-lane examples are parking lanes.

There's a stroad on Staten Island that scares the crap out of me - Hylan Blvd. I have family that live on it. It's six lanes with a median, but sometimes and in certain places parking is allowed in the outermost lanes. So you can suddenly come up on parked traffic but only at certain times of day in certain places. It's totally insane.

To get in the driveway, you have to loop the block to the closest light, wait for the green, and then drive halfway down the block and back-in before the light changes and traffic starts up. It's quite stressful.

Over here we have that, well something similar, outside of towns and cities for one lane. In cities max 2 lanes, with a 50 kmh speed limit. And those are rare, street cross section have traffic lights and those from parking lots are scary enough. And slow enough, it is sometimes faster to not cross lanes and just turn around at the next traffic light.

Commonplace in suburban Chicago.

That's exactly it, except with businesses with parking lots on each side and lots of cars pulling in and out. Also a 55 mph speed limit that's routinely ignored unless there's enough traffic to slow everyone down.

Colloquially called a "suicide lane".

The way it's shown on that page, it looks like every part of that lane can be used in both directions. In Netherland we do have separate lanes to turn left, but only before an intersection, and only to be used in the direction towards that intersection. People turning left in the other direction will be on the other side of the intersection. There will be lines on the road directing you where you're supposed to go. The left-turning lane will have a very limited length, only existing near the intersection that it's for. Also, I think there are usually traffic lights ensuring safe crossing for left-turners.

Having just a general all-purpose two-directional left-turning lane looks incomprehensibly dangerous to me.

A common thing I see drivers in my city do is pull into the center turning lane and then merge into their intended lane when doing a left turn. It's super illegal afaik, but I see it done all the time, I've even seen police do it. Of course, the alternative to this maneuver is waiting a very long time until both lanes are clear before turning because the stroad you're turning left on is extremely congested (though not extraordinarily congested in my cities case)

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