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Comment by simulate-me | Hacker News Reader

I find the "right of way" signs in Europe way more strange, specifically when the signs aren't present. When you're on a main thoroughfare, it's pretty obvious you have the right of way. It's on the smaller side streets where you need to yield to the person to your right that things get a little weird.

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It's natural once you've learnt it -- throroughfare doesn't really matter, the street you're on is signed as having right of way or you have yield signs, otherwise always yield to the car from the right. No signage => yield right.

I'm still not sure who's got the right of way e.g. in US parking lots or unsigned back roads. The person going straight, I think? But that's not always clear depending on road topology. "Yield to the right" seems more well-defined, but maybe because I got used to it.

Sydney has a crazy number of signs but I like their use of yield signs and relative lack of unsigned intersections.

It took me a while to learn to automatically look for European yield signs. It was by far the highest effort to change between the two systems for me.

I don't like the default to yield to progress as it means one is looking for the absence of something most of the time.

You always have the right of way in the U.S. unless there is a stop sign or a yield sign. If both directions have stop signs, then the person who arrived first has the right-of-way. To me, it's more straight forward to always have right-of-way, but that's probably because I'm used to it.

Unsigned intersections exist and they work as in Europe. The reality of them is people handle them relatively well as long as lines of sight are good, and when they become a problem they’re improved (usually by adding a stop sign that people ignore).

Traffic calming is better done with mechanisms not signs.

I only really see here stop signs when there is either very poor visibility or very high speed difference. In my mind it works well enough.

> You always have the right of way in the U.S. unless there is a stop sign or a yield sign.

Incorrect. There are explicit right of way rules for completely unsigned intersections. Yes, they do exist. My neighborhood hasn’t been fully polluted with stop signs yet, so about half our intersections are unsigned. The last crash in the neighborhood that I am aware of was about 10 years ago and was wholly unrelated to intersection control.

Driveways, parking lots, and some merge lanes don't have stop or yield signs. So it's not always marked.

Much more interesting are one lane tunnels or bridges that have a yield sign on both sides. Effectively, people just do fist come first served, but if it's at the same time you have to negotiate who has the right of way.

Small streets can be difficult but often in the U.K. you just get a thick dashed line across the road when you need to give way in a normal place. That’s usually sufficient to figure out which street takes priority over the other (intersections where the middle isn’t part of one of the roads are uncommon) and where to give way.

That's how it works, yes, but why is it strange and a little weird?

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