To many people, I know this thread title is about as intuitive as “In praise of sawing my legs off”, but let me explain…
For those not acquainted with the concept, a “Michigan left turn” takes place on a major thoroughfare, such as Telegraph or Woodward in Detroit, and entails turning right at the intersection rather than left, proceeding a few 100 yards to the designated U-turn area, and then making the turn. (This traffic scheme requires sizable medians.) Left turns in the “real” intersection are not allowed.
A pain in the ass, perhaps, for the people turning left, but a blessing for the other 95% of the traffic which isn’t turning left. And to me that’s the beauty of the scheme: you don’t have dozens (or hundreds) of vehicles all sitting idle while the left turn traffic gets its turn in the intersection.
A few other points:
(1) You can turn right on red.
(2) At the U-turn area, you can turn LEFT on red (if there’s a light at all there), since it’s a one-way-to-one-way turn.
The biggest disadvantage of this scheme: it’s unheard of nearly everywhere else.
I will now duck and cover as the “are you crazy?” responses come rolling in. But while you’re flaming me, please also describe how the system you prefer moves traffic more efficiently than does this one. (Other than Roundabouts, which I think are better still…
Sizeable medians? they’d want to be very sizeable indeed. One or two cars might be okay, but when you’ve got more than that, surely they’d be banking back out into the left lane on the second street, thereby annoying the drivers there, rather than blocking the left lane in the original street.
For little-used turns, it might be a good idea. Otherwise, I think it’s a lot of hassle for the left-turners for no real benefit to the others. Sure the peope on the first street benefit, but only at the expense of those on the second.
I’m not necessarily dissing the idea without having seen it in practice in Michigan, but I’ve got my doubts.
Lots of times there’ll be another lane added, making the median strip narrower. Thus you can have about five to ten cars waiting to go the other way while the rest of traffic is flowing free.
Yes, they are called “slip lanes”. My argument does not depend on whether such a lane exists or not. If not (I was visualising a simple layout - bear with me, I’m stretching my “drive on the left” brain for this as it is! ) then this system can only “hold” one or two cars (depending on the width of the median) before they start fouling the through lane. Similarly, if there is a dedicated slip lane with right turn arrows, then the system still only holds one or two cars above what the slip lane would have anyway - in other words, the slip lane may as well have been on the original street. With enough traffic, the through lanes get blocked either way.
I’ve been to Michigan only once, with my father the truck driver. It was quite possibly the most obnoxious thing ever. He, who had been there several times before, told me about this on the drive there. Me: “Wait… what? You really can’t turn left?” Him: “Yes, you really can’t turn left.” Me: “WTF?” Him: “I don’t know, Sarah. I just don’t know.”
Maybe it makes more sense when you’re driving a car.
In Melbourne Australia we have the same thing (substituting left for right as we drive on the other side of the road)
To us in Sydney though its just one of those crazy Melbourne things (they are all wierd down there)
I mean wahts a tram, is it a train or a car, it can be both, just ge ta bus (freaks) and need I start on AFL (australian Football League) talk about aerial ping pong.
I think the point is that the original intersection doesn’t have to wait for people to turn left. The people who want to turn left will instead turn right onto the cross street, get in the leftmost lane and double back to the original intersection facing the direction they wanted to go.
Really, it’s just there to drive non-Michiganders nuts, apparently.
Not the same. The Melbourne thing is a “hook turn” and is performed at the same intersection as a normal turn would be - it’s just done very, very weirdly. The Melbourne thing is to prevent cars waiting to turn from fouling the central tram lines. The Michigan one is intended to promote traffic flow.
I understand the mechanics of it, and there may well be specific intersections where the thing works a charm - say, if the up / down street is very narrow and busy, and the cross street is very wide and quieter, then it’d be great. Without seeing specific examples though, and just taking it as a theoretical example using two identical streets, I wonder whether it’s worth the trouble. If you only have one or two cars turning left during the average traffic light cycle, it’s probably brilliant. If you have a few more, then you’d better hope you have a slip lane, and maybe that extra two cars which can be accommodated accross the median will still help. If you have a lot, it’s probably a waste of time.
The Michigan left cannot hold a candle to the Pittsburgh left.
Sadly, when you try to execute the Pittsburgh left in Atlanta, people do things like swear and honk their horns and ram into the side of your car.
I didn’t know they had those elsewhere – they have them here, and it’s a major pain in the ass. I’d never heard of anything like it until I moved here. Instead of the left-turning traffic blocking any cars behind them, it blocks the cars trying to get through on the other road. Either way, you have a problem. I HAAAAAAAAAATE it!
Thank you. I was quite confused until I saw that. I’ll have to go to Michigan and check it out sometime. Left turns can be quite a pain here in California.
Not in Michigan. The left-turn-at-the-median is set far enough away from the intersection and the left-turn-on-red keeps the traffic moving so that only on extraordinary occasions (such as the riverfront fireworks) is there ever a danger of gridlock. It sounds as though the New Orleans versions have not been engineered correctly.
From reading libwen’s link, it sounds like the wide median that allows the Michigan Left is also the reason that it’s required.
At an intersection of two streets without medians, you can set up the signals to have two left turn arrows be green at the same time (coming from opposite directions, they can complete their left turns without their paths crossing). But in the diagram in the link, the wide median prevents that. If I wanted to turn left, I’d have to cross the path of oncoming traffic that wanted to make their own left turns, and so the traffic light cycle couldn’t be green for both of us at the same time.
There’s a way to handle it with regular left turn lanes by changing the way the traffic lights cycle. If you think of just the east-west traffic, eastbound gets the turn arrow at the beginning of the green cycle, and westbound at the end.
But the issue is that while the left turn arrow is in use, no through traffic is moving on either of the streets. In the Michigan system, through traffic is always moving on one or the other.
Maybe I’m just used to them, having lived in Michigan for most of my life, but I can’t see why they don’t have them everywhere.
They actually make it easier to make a left turn. When I lived in Chicago, I would have to wait for 4 or 5 light changes to make a left at a busy intersection, but you don’t have that problem with the Michigan left.
The only problem is that it isn’t consistant so if you’re not familiar with the intersection, you have to look far enough ahead to get into the correct lane to make a turn.
That is entirely possible. It’s not like money gets spent on the roads down here. But I still find it to be a massive pain; I vastly prefer left-turn arrows, and there are a lot of intersections with those here as well. Screw consistency, right? Either, though, is an improvement on what I’ll call the Los Angeles Left, which involves pulling into the intersection and waiting until the light turns red, then going ahead, followed by several cars. And no, nobody got ticketed for this where I saw – the cops were often the fourth or even fifth car through!
But while you’re flaming me, please also describe how the system you prefer moves traffic more efficiently than does this one. (Other than Roundabouts, which I think are better still…
) then this system can only “hold” one or two cars (depending on the width of the median) before they start fouling the through lane. Similarly, if there is a dedicated slip lane with right turn arrows, then the system still only holds one or two cars above what the slip lane would have anyway - in other words, the slip lane may as well have been on the original street. With enough traffic, the through lanes get blocked either way.