I answered other too quickly. If the driver had any other reasonable means to end up going in the direction he wanted without crossing lanes and holding up traffic like that, he should have. So unless turning right put him on a divided highway with no exits before he would have run out of gas, he shouldn’t have done it.
Total asshole move. Driver needs to be bitched-slapped with a trout
And if it’s not illegal elsewhere it should be. I mean really what’s the difference between that maneuver and turning right from the far left lane by pushing your way through moving traffic?
Boy, those of you who are seething at this maneuver need to stay the hell out of Dallas. I have a 15-minute commute and I see this kind of thing at least once a day.
Is there any other way for the driver to make it to the street he wants to get on without going across three lanes?
Is there a driveway farther back from the intersection?
An exit that is perpendicular to where he exited wouldn’t help unless it wasn’t very busy, because he’d have to cross oppositely-directed traffic.
This is a classic case of obstructing and warrants a citation. I have seen cases where all the lanes give the break willingly and I would not call that impeding traffic.
Adds one more to a long list of reasons. 
You can always turn right and go around the block–it might add as much as 10 minutes to your commute, but if 10 people didn’t make the light because of this little stunt, that’s way more than 10 minutes of other people’s time that was taken up.
Someone did exactly this to me. Sadly for him, he didn’t see me driving in the left turn lane when he stuck his nose into it. I still have the bent bumper, but he had to be towed away on a flatbed - whatever he was driving was more than a little outmatched by my 9,000 lb. F-350.
I don’t know. There are places that I can think of where “going around the block” would be quite a diversion because the roads aren’t exactly square.
Where it would be more than 10 or 15 minutes? Not many, and even if it is, I think you gotta suck it up in this case. At the utmost, such a thing would add 30 minutes to a drive. Frustrating, to be sure, but driving is often frustrating.
Or turn right, make a left turn into parking lot or side street a little ways down, and tun around there. Or use one of the other parking lot exits the OP mentioned. But don’t make your problem everyone else’s.
should not have done that, but no exclamation point.
I don’t think it’s legal, either - you’re obstructing traffic. I think it’s creating an unnecessarily dangerous situation, too, like stopping for someone who’s jaywalking, and the next lane of traffic doesn’t stop and smushes them.
The driver in the right lane/OP was being courteous, ASSUMING that the driver was going to turn right into the right lane and get the hell out of the way.
In some states, when you make a right turn onto a multi-lane road, you have to turn into the right lane…you’re not allowed to cross over into the left lane, which is what this driver did. (I lost points on my first driver’s road test by turning right into the left lane – Louisiana).
I learned later (I’m pretty sure on the SDMB) that some states don’t have this law.
The driver was definitely risking getting broadsided. He/she should’ve turned into the right lane and then merged to the left over the next block or two and made a U-Turn.
Chicago, too. I might encounter a similar maneuver two, three times in a single drive up certain busy streets. I’ve given up on getting upset about it.
When telling the story yesterday, I was picturing a nearby strip-mall parking lot with multiple exits. I took another look on the way home and realized my memory was slightly faulty; it was a small lot of a fast-food place, so the driver didn’t really have any other choices regarding where to exit the lot.
She was turning into southbound lanes and wanted to go east. So, she could have turned into the right lane, gone straight through the intersection, then turned right into the strip mall on the corner, cut through the lot and made another right onto the E-W street, heading in her desired direction and back through the same intetsection (probably what I would have chosen to do).
Or, she could have turned right, gradually made her way to the left and turned at the next light about a quarter-mile down, which does indeed lead to a parallel N-S street that would have taken her back to where she wanted to be.
So in short, there were other options; they would have required more thought and effort than what she chose to do, but would have been safer and less obtrusive to other drivers.
I’ll add that I didn’t expect this poll to be so lopsided. I can be an almost annoyingly courteous driver, and I can’t stand being in anybody’s way, so I’d never consider doing what this driver did. I was in no way sure that my opinion would prevail.
This is what happened to me last week, but the driver that t-boned me wasn’t trying to get into the left-turn lane, she was trying to turn left onto the street I was driving on. I didn’t see her in time, and she didn’t see me in time, because the driver in the right lane that stopped to let her through was in a big SUV. That driver didn’t hang around for the police, either.
Whether or not the person would actually get pulled over by a cop, that is definitely illegal here. Not only is it obstructing traffic, but there’s also a law here that requires you to stay in a lane for a certain distance which going directly to the left-turn lane obviously violates. Around here in situations where that’s possible, if it happens often, they usually end up redesigning the road to prevent it by adding islands and what-not to prevent it, which just makes it that much more inconvenient for everyone.
Anyway, at the very least, it’s extremely rude to hold up multiple lanes of traffic. If there’s multiple exits, surely that person could have gotten out somewhere else to avoid that. Though it does seem pretty dangerous because, especially in heavy traffic and it’s not unlikely he may have been T-boned.
I don’t know if it’s illegal in NC, Contrapuntal, because when something very similar happened to me, the cop didn’t even write a citation or find blame in the accident. Granted, it was slightly different, but only slightly:
One rainy evening I was coming home from work at around 5:30. Traffic was slowed to a crawl, but the left-turn lane was empty, and I pulled into it as I prepared to turn, y’know, left. So I was going maybe 20 MPH or so as cars to my right were stopped.
About 20 feet from my left turn, some dude in an SUV pulled out in front of my compact (guess whose car got the worst of it). Someone in the stopped traffic lane had waved him through, and he apparently forgot that there was a left turn lane, so he decided to turn left from a parking lot. I slammed on the brakes and then slammed into his driver-side front wheel well.
Even though he’d made a left turn in front of oncoming traffic, the cop refused to assign blame. Fortunately and amazingly, however, his insurance company called me soon thereafter; as I was trying to convince them that he’d been at fault, the adjustor interrupted me and said, “We’re taking responsibility for this collision, we just need to set up an appointment at a body repair shop for you.”