For years I’ve been cutting through a specific gas station which enables me to avoid two lights. When my wife is with me I always drive up to a gas pump, pause, say something like “Too expensive” and keep going.
Is there a distinction between a traffic light and a stop sign? Are both “devices”??
It’s dependent on individual state laws, but in most (all?) cases, either both will be defined as “traffic control devices” or the law will state that it applies to both “devices and signs.”
For example, the Ohio Revised Code definition:
Under this definition, a person standing in the street directing traffic is also a “traffic control device.”
Seriously? The laws weren’t made for “every one else”. There’s a good reason cars are to stay on the public thoroughfares and not cutting through private property. How would you feel about this if you were the merchant?
I don’t know about him, but as long as no one else was around, I wouldn’t care at all. I’d care more about you running a red light than I would about someone driving across my property on a part that’s supposed to be driven on.
If I did care, then no one would be allowed to turn around on my driveway, either.
bolding mine.
I’m probably more sensitive to this because we owned a corner gas station lot at one of the busiest intersections in the city. As the property owner, I had to make sure my lot was clear of debris, snow, potholes as a cost of doing business. I didn’t get tax dollars for resurfacing or striping like the city does.
We also aren’t talking about an occasional car cutting the corner at 2am like you would find turning around in your driveway. By the admission of Plan B, he’s been doing this practice for years and if it cuts out 2 traffic lights, I’d guess it is a constant stream of traffic in this merchant’s lot.
I’ll quit nagging but will leave you with the plea to please be considerate of your business owners. We’re not all mega-corps with huge profit margins and this kind of disrespect actually cuts into the money that puts food on our tables, just like your job.
I think if I was a merchant, I’d be pretty good with a constant stream of traffic in my lot. At least a few of these people are going to, since they’re right there anyway, stop for gas, run in to grab smokes, etc. So long as the traffic isn’t so heavy as to impede other customers, I’m not seeing the downside.
Ruby told you the downside: wear and tear of the surface and interference with customers. Drivers who cut across gas stations (and other private property) are doing so to evade a light. Hence, they are in a hurry and are not going to stop for gas or goodies.
You’re not in Orange County are you?
When I did traffic school there, almost the whole thing was taken up with a semi-retired sheriff telling us all the things we thought were illegal that (at least in OC) aren’t. Like driving barefoot, changing lanes in an intersection, cutting through parking lots, etc.
I used to do something similar in Northern Virginia. I worked at an industrial park just north of Dulles International Airport. To get back in towards town (DC), you either had to take the toll road or a free Dulles Access Road (which had no exits for about 15 miles). The latter also had noticably less traffic. I could enter the airport property on the north side, make a couple of turns, then be on the Access Road fairly quickly. But, since you were supposed to have airport business to use the AR, they’d often follow cars from the northern entrance to see if they did anything at the airport before exiting.
I started either stopping at the post office to mail a letter, or at the Exxon at the airport. Even the minute or two I spent there was enough to be officially doing business at the airport, and I’d get on the AR with no hassles.
Nope, Alameda County. And I actually took online traffic school, which had a little section that was basically the same thing.
Related question: Is it illegal to cut through a parking lot in order to **use **a traffic light?
On my way home, I have to make a left onto a busy road. The road I’m on Ts into the busy road at an odd angle, making it difficult to see what’s coming up on the right (particularly since the road curves there). It has a stop sign. It also has an entrance to a shopping center where, if you cut through, you get to use a traffic light to make the left safely.
There’s a grocery store in the center that I stop at about once a week, but I make that left every working day.
I would suggest that you curve the car to the right (as if to make a right turn) before turning left. You will, of course, have your left turn signal blinking. This will enable you to better see cars on your right. If you feel safer using the traffic signal, go ahead and do that.
Reported as spam.
I always wonder about this, because there’s a left-turn light on my commute that’s always backed up through the preceding intersection. So I stay in the straight-through lanes, procede through the intersection, turn left through the oncoming traffic, go through a bank parking lot, and pull out on the street that the left turn would’ve put me on.
ETA: That is, I procede from -y toward the origin, cross it, turn left into the quadrant II, and turn right onto the -x axis toward -infinity.
So I always wonder, if a cop pulled me over, if I could successfully argue that I didn’t evading the device since I went through the intersection legally. “Which device did I evade? The green one I went underneath?”
Beyond the inconvenience/disrespect/cost to the lot’s owner the point of the law is that cutting across the lot adds to the hazards of driving.
In the first place, the driver who does this is doing it because they are too impatient to wait at the light. What are the odds that they will cross through the lot slowly and carefully, using only the delineated aisles? About zero from what I have observed. By driving quickly and short cutting diagonally through unused parking spaces they increase the hazard to pedestrians and other cars in the lot. People who actually intend to park are not trying to get anywhere else, and for the most part are moving slowly and carefully as you should in a parking lot where traffic can suddenly appear from any direction.
Next, drivers who do this rarely plan to until confronted by the red light. So they turn into the lot without signalling, and without slowing down much. The bicyclist they just passed, and ignored because they were not planning to turn right at that moment then gets run over.
Next, the driver will likely have to cross sidewalks twice, endangering pedestrians for no good reason, and pull into the cross traffic that has the green light, and they will likely be angling such that the traffic is coming from behind, so often will be using only their mirror to check traffic. They won’t turn their head far enough to see the old fart on bicycle in the bike lane, but fortunately he knows these fools well enough not to give them the chance to run over him, which is how he lived long enough to be an old fart.
He would probably say that you were evading the one with the left turn arrow.
Where I grew up the ticket would be for “Using a private drive as a thoroughfare”, although the only people I knew of to get ticketed for it were avoiding stoplights or stop signs.
What about this situation, which I do with semi-regular frequency:
There is a light that changes very frequently and during heavy traffic times you may wait through 4-5 cycles of the light to get through. I’m almost always turning right at that light. There are residential streets nearby, however, which you can take to bypass the light, that is, take a right onto a side street, then a left onto another side street, then a right onto the street I meant to turn onto in the first place.
Since I’m still travelling on legal streets the whole time, this is legal, right?
I don’t see why not, not unless the residential streets have “no through traffic” or “local traffic only” signs.