Again, we live in different places, with different expectations. Where I live, a careful driver expects pedestrians to pop into the street and expects cars to pop out to go around obstacles.
Abrupt illegal pullouts are okay, because drivers in your area expect people to make abrupt illegal pullouts? Color me skeptical of this argument. Are fear and ruthless efficiency also among your chief weapons while driving?
Oh, they are probably illegal. But you’d be crazy not to keep an eye out for them. I mean that in all seriousness. It’s important to know the style of driving where you live.
For instance, I’ve driven both in NYC and in Boston. In NYC, drivers typically start driving straight through an intersection the moment the light changes, often even a bit before. (That’s why my waiting for the fallen pedestrian was so transgressive.) In Boston, it’s typical for the people waiting to turn left to move immediately, to grab the intersection before it’s full of incoming traffic.
Obviously, these two, together, would lead to countless collisions. In fact, neither style is terribly problematic because the other drivers expect it. In NY, the people turning left wait for traffic to clear. In Boston, the people going straight pause to make sure the intersection is clear. I’m sure there are more fender benders in both cities than in cities that have less aggressive drivers. But neither is crazy bad. And last i looked, Boston had unusually low pedestrian fatality rates, despite being chock-a-block full of jaywalking pedestrians. Boston drivers know to watch for pedestrians and avoid them. (or maybe Boston just has so much traffic that cars rarely move fast enough to kill.)
I wasn’t questioning the wisdom of watching out for other people making abrupt maneuvers. I was questioning the wisdom of making abrupt maneuvers on the basis that other people are probably watching for them because “drivers behave differently here” or something. Perhaps most people in Boston and Manhattan drive aggressively, but that’s really not a good reason to emulate them, except perhaps in a narrow set of situations where lack of assertiveness might in itself cause a greater hazard.
It also seems to be a little odd to be making claims that driving behavior and reasonable expectations are so strongly associated with location, when we’re talking about things whose purpose is to, you know, change your location. How do you know the guy behind you that you expect to cope with your aggressive driving to avoid a collision isn’t a yokel from Santa Fe?
In fact, if you are driving in NY and you are not assertive enough, you will absolutely cause problems. It’s comparable to the “no one moves at the 4-way stop sign” problem. And traffic jams in Manhattan can be very hard to untangle.
So if you are driving in NY, you SHOULD emulate NY drivers. Otherwise, you are the problem.
There are lots of local differences in driving. For instance, I’ve driven on highways in the midwest where there is little traffic and three lanes, and everyone resolutely stays in the rightmost lane, and then every time someone wants to merge onto the highway, the entire stream of vehicles has to shift to the left, and then they ALL move back to block the right lane again. I think that’s crazy. Where I am from, if there’s plenty of space, the right lane is left open for people getting on and off the highway, the left lane is left for passing, and people just moving along stay in the middle lane. Which honestly seems a lot safer to me than creating a lot of needless slow-to-high-speed merges. But when I drive in the midwest, I stick to the right, too. Because god only knows what the other drivers will expect me to do if I violate the local norms by driving comfortably in the middle lane.
Most driving is done locally, by people who know the local norms. People who are travelling should watch what the locals are doing, and try to learn the local norms. The US has made attempts to regularize the laws across the country, and they are, indeed, a lot more uniform than they were when I was a kid. But there are still tons of regional differences.
There’s a huge excluded middle here between aggressive driving and being so timid that you cause a problem. In the example of the OP here, you’re never going to “cause problems” by not making an abrupt illegal lane change to jump a line of traffic waiting to get through a junction, for example.
Sure, and if these are just arbitrary conventions that are safety-neutral, it’s best to just observe and conform. But if you’re trying to categorize aggressive driving as nothing more than a “local norm”, that’s where we part company on whether it’s safer to emulate that behavior yourself.
In the scenario the OP describes, my mother was the second car in line behind the car turning left. When oncoming traffic cleared and the driver turned left, my mother went straight and was hit by the car passing the other cars on the right. The guy that hit my mother tried to intimidate her into confessing she was at fault. Fortunately the guy behind my mother was a pastor and gladly told the officer what happened. This happened years before mandatory insurance laws and both my mother and the other driver were uninsured. My mom ended up with a bent 64 Ford and the other driver got a $33 ticket.
Please allow me to hijack for a rant.
Turning left from a medium-sized street (so decent traffic) to a main drag. The protected left arrow last for (if lucky) three cars BUT it then goes to a solid green like it is a minor side street. Of course with the number of cars on the other side of the intersection going straight you cannot turn except when it cycles yellow to red … and sometimes not even then as someone from the other side is incorrectly sure they can make it through before it goes red. Oh and since the cross street is the main drag, if you miss the cycle you have to wait a while.
So today I’m #3 and the green arrow comes on. Driver #1 waits. #2 doesn’t honk. I do but no effect. Light turns yellow then just as it goes red, “Oh shit, I should go!” so driver #1 makes it. I don’t know about your state but here driver #2 can pull into the intersection on the solid green and complete the turn on yellow/red. But of course they don’t pull forward. I honk. No effect. They sit there through the green and only turn on the NEXT green arrow.
If I saw this consistently given the scenerio posed by the OP, I’d be tempted to pull out into the RHTL to go straight and if stopped by a cop ask them, “Why don’t you ticket those people in the left lane for obstructing traffic?”
I’m not recommending that you dart out into the right lane. Yes, it is absolutely safer to sit for a few minutes until you can get through the light from the lane you are in. What I dispute is the idea that it’s somehow especially dangerous because other drivers won’t expect you to do that. And I’m just saying that where I live, other drivers absolutely expect that sort of maneuver, and any driver who doesn’t, and just plows on ahead expecting everyone to stay out of their way, is a careless and unsafe driver.
Or, as my boss pointed out when I worked in the auto claims department of a major insurance company: good drivers have fewer not-at-fault accidents, too.
So you’re inventing some other hypothetical driver who is using the RTO for its intended purpose, but not as attentive as he might be, to justify your abrupt illegal pull-out into from the straight-ahead lane into the RTO lane to jump the line of traffic, in which you are clearly the primary cause of the accident?
I give up, good luck with convincing a judge and your insurance company that this is a remotely sensible approach to driving.
Lol, i think we are talking past each other.