If you are in a marked turning course you have to turn. If you are on a one way street or in a tunnel and lanes are separated by a solid white line there are no lane changes allowed. It does not come up that often.
Hi, gotpasswords and Loach: Thanks for the input. I think I learned a good lesson. It is true what they say about left turn accidents. The fault will almost always be automatically meted out to the left turning drivers. I will never trust a flashing turn signal again from now on. It took some of my pride away from me, as I always thought I was a good driver, and I was still a bit shocked that I could have made such a mistake.
One time I was driving through a residential area behind a slow Ford van and, as we approached an intersection, I see his right taillight flash as he starts to pull to the right. As I’m passing on the left both taillights come on as he makes a quick turn to the left in front of me pulling into the driveway of his house! I slam on my brakes and miss him by inches. He had first pulled to the right so that he’d be straight as he entered his driveway.
It turns out that for some vans and trucks, the brake lights are shared with the turn signals. The guy in the van had actually turned his left blinker on at the exact same time as applying his brakes. Thus, the left taillight being on was the brake light and the right taillight was off because it had just begun blinking. Go figure!
My driving instructor told me the same thing. It’s saved my butt on more than one occasionl.
That’s the point of senegoid’s original comment. He was responding to CookingWithGas, who last year wrote
I was wondering the same thing when I read CookingWithGas’s comment. Why would his friend have been found at fault for failure to yield, when the other driver was legally not allowed to proceed straight?
Oh, and I was right about Michigan’s law regarding white lines.
A single solid white line separating two lanes of traffic moving in the same direction means crossing is not recommended, but does not mean it is prohibited. Crossing two white lines is prohibited. See Signs, Pavement Markings and Signals (PDF), or Traffic Talk: Is it legal to cross a solid white line?
I really do try not to jump into every one of these, but this begs for clarification:
Criminal law (cops) is black & white. The rule is clear, if your actions fall outside the rule you are in violation and law enforcement has the option to cite you.
Civil law is different because it addresses the gray area of negligence. About the most black/white idea in defining negligence is, “What would a reasonably prudent person do under the same circumstances.” That’s all you get for a standard.
In the OP scenario, the car didn’t technically do anything wrong and the OP on the motorcycle did. Loach writes the ticket to the mangled motorcyclist for failing to yield. As a matter of civil law, there is plenty of negligence to slap onto the car for misleading other traffic. A slightly different example as an illustration: A car and a motorcycle are approaching an intersection at the same time from opposite directions. Just as they enter the intersection, the car begins to turn to the left, then reconsiders and continues straight without ever leaving it’s lane of travel. The motorcycle responds to what he perceives to be an imminent collision and lays the bike down. There is no contact between the two vehicles. If there is no evidence the car left it’s lane, then there is no basis for the driver to receive a ticket. Most times in the real world, the car driver will be found to bear the majority of fault despite not having violated any statute (and often he’ll get a ticket anyway for careless driving–which I chalk up to cop’s opinion & sense of justice seeking to punish the real culprit).
As for what the insurance cabal does with the police report, the citation is a criminal matter and so is not admissible in civil court (whether it is upheld or dismissed in traffic court). The opinion of the reporting officer, however, is admissible. The citation attests to the cop’s opinion of what happened based on his brief on-scene investigation. Should the case go to civil trial, the officer can be deposed as a witness.
What gets me is someone who pulls into the right turn only lane, and then signals! What for? Once I rode with a banker who routinely pulled into the left turn lane at red lights, and floored it straight ahead, beating others across. Don’t know how he avoided tickets. I didn’t say anything - I owed him money!
Well its not totally black and white. We have discretion and don’t have to write tickets for every accident. And the accident report does not have a spot that says “at fault.” There can be multiple contributing circumstances from all parties involved. Vehicle #1 may have made an illegal turn but vehicle #2 was driving too fast. Driver #1 may have been inattentive while Driver #2 was following to close for the road conditions.
Because the law says you must signal your intention to turn for at least 100 ft prior, not “except if you are in a designated turn lane”. Sure, they should signal their lane change, too, but nobody’s perfect.
Agreed. I see people making unsignaled turns all the time. Especially where they keep me waiting, wanting to make a turn myself as they approach, it pisses me off.
Or possibly, because the driver has made it an in-grained habit to signal! It can be argued that this is the best of all ways to deal with driving details like that. If you have to think about it every time, you will certainly forget sometimes. But if you make it a habit, you will never forget.
ETA: And BTW, CA law is a bit more flexible about it. You are required to signal a turn or lane change if the action will affect other traffic.
You can see the obvious problem, that this leaves much to the judgment of the driver. And much to the judgment of any cop who sees that driver. I don’t suppose the police tend to be very hard-nosed about enforcing this (I’ve never seen it), unless after-the-fact when an actual accident happens. And then it could be hard to prove if a driver signaled, unless the smoking wreckage is still blinking when the cop arrives on-scene.
I also sometimes see the solid white line when driving over a bridge. It’s not immediately obvious (to me) why it’s important to not change lanes on a bridge. (ETA: Or even in a tunnel for that matter, depending on the ambient visibility.)
Here’s another situation where the solid single white line is used. They do this in Hawaii. Where a freeway on-ramp merges into the freeway, there will be a solid single white line, to dis-allow lane changes for a short distance between the right-most lane and the lane just left of that.
Thus, where drivers are merging from the ramp onto the right-most lane of the freeway, there are NOT also drivers merging to or from that same right-most lane from the other side. Now that DOES seem like some good logic.
The people on the other sides of the intersection don’t necessarily know that the lane is for turning only. It also signals that you do intend to turn (vs, say, bailing out and going straight - improper though that may be).
Individual states can have laws that deviate from the standard and confuse drivers for no good reason, but the standard is that a single solid white line does not mean “no lane change”:
http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/knowledge/faqs/faq_part3.htm#q7
There aren’t many double white lines out there, but they do exist.
Because the law requires it.
Must depend on jurisdiction. That’s certainly not the case in Illinois, where single white lines are advisory (doubles are mandatory, though):
From page 72 of Illinois’s rules of the road (PDF file).
The US government’s department of transportation also says “a single white line indicates that lane changes are discouraged.”
ETA: Whoops, I see someone already covered the USDOT’s stance on this one.
This would make me go postal. If that asshole was in a right turn only lane, then their only right of way should be to make the turn; I have to hope the person had a bad lawyer. Not signaling is an offense. So should false signaling.
Then what do dashed lines in Illinois indicate? There has to be a difference.
That you can change lanes freely. This is the same as the USDOT guidelines linked to above. Here’s the rest of the quote from the US DOT: