This is a bit of a nitpick. The California motor vehicle code does not expressly prohibit changing lanes while passing through an intersection. So any of the three vehicles in the other lane could change lanes from where they are. I would make the turn if I determined that I could do so ahead of a suddenly changing-lane vehicle.
In Michigan you’re required to stay in the same lane, but you’re stupid if you count on this behavior. When I lived in Ontario, though, people take this seriously, and it works. My way to work every morning for a year involved an unprotected left turn onto a busy road with busy oncoming traffic (with a right-lane-must-turn lane), and if we’d not followed the “stay in your lane” rule, no one would have ever turned left from my lane.
It’s a simple, basic, concept to stay in your lane, and it would make everyone’s life easier if we could all just follow it.
I would probably make the turn. It is not 100% safe but the benefit outweighs the risk.
The risk is that one of the cars A, B, or C will #1 foolishly decide to change lane in an intersection (unlikely) AND #2A not see me even though I’m right in from of them, OR #2B decide to hit me anyway just to teach me a lesson even though it means damaging their own car, OR #2C see me but be unable to stop because they are going waaay faster than I’m going. I’ll admit that all those risks are certainly possible and such things do happen but they are very rare. I might change my answer if the speeds were really high. If cars A, B, and C are going 55 mph and I’ll only be able to accelerate to 10 mph by the time they reach me, then it’s a big risk. But if they are going 30 and I’ll be up to 20 by the time they reach me, they should have plenty of time to see me and avoid the collision but even if they don’t it will be a relatively low speed impact, not likely to result in serious injury, just damage to the car.
Now consider the down side of staying put. Depending on the intersection and the timing of the lights, this could result in me (and all the cars lined up behind me who also want to turn right on red) being late for work by anywhere from five seconds to two minutes.
Let’s quantify this with a risk/benefit analysis. There are several thousand car crashes every day, in a statistical universe where hundreds of millions of cars are on the road, each one going through dozens of intersections. If I drive defensively, the odds are roughly ten million to one against me being in a car crash at any given intersection on any given day. If I make this right on red, suppose the odds change by a factor of 100. So it’s a 0.001% chance that my car will be damaged and I’ll be an hour late for work, maybe I’ll get a ticket for failure to yield. That would cost me $100 (my insurance deductible) plus $10 for an hour’s wages (and a similar amount for the other person) plus a $200 ticket. Multiply 0.001% times $420 and I’m gambling .0042 dollars (just under half a cent). But if I stay put and wait 60 seconds for the light to change, being 1 minute late for work costs me 16.7 cents in wages. If there are 5 cars lined up behind me, all six of us being 60 seconds late for work costs us a total of 1 dollar. The value gained for being on time is a dollar and the value lost for having a crash is less than half a cent. The gain is worth the risk, by several orders of magnitude.
You could argue that, rather than being one minute late for work, I should have left home one minute earlier and then I could have been on time. In that case, the appropriate risk/benefit calculation would be based on giving up one minute of my leisure time at home eating breakfast, which typically is counted at half the person’s hourly working wage. So figure 60 seconds at $5 per hour instead, and you get 8 cents I’m losing by leaving home 1 minute early. Again, that is several orders of magnitude bigger than the .022 cents being risked by the possibility of having a car crash turning right on red.
To be fair, I acknowledge the fact that, for the sake of simplicity, I’m ignoring the extreme case where the crash ends up being deadly and/or very expensive BUT I’m also ignoring the extreme case where me being late for work causes me to get fired and lose my job. Both are extreme outliers. One is an argument in favor of the right on red, the other an argument against it. I think it’s fair to ignore both and focus instead on the much more likely outcomes: small delay vs. tiny risk of vehicle damage.
FWIW, there’s an intersection I go through every day where I’m turning right onto a one-way street with FOUR lanes going the same way. If there are cars in lanes 1 and 2, but none in lanes 3 and 4, there’s virtually no risk for me to turn right into lane 4. For someone to hit me, they’d have to swerve all the way from lane 2 to lane 4, in the middle of an intersection, and then not be able to stop before hitting me. That’s less likely than being struck by lightning. And yet, at least twice a month, I end up stuck behind someone who refuses to take that tiny risk and turn right on red, even though the lane is clear and the lane next to it is also clear. I think those people are being very inconsiderate of the cars lined up behind them.
Can I have a cite for that, please?
Your whole risk-benefit analysis is based on a faulty premise. None of the cars (A B or C) are in the intersection yet and only C is close enough to not be able to change lanes before entering the intersection. The chance of A or B changing lanes is much higher than you think.
And if waiting 60 seconds at one light is enough to make you late, that’s extremely poor planning. The necessary time for any commute varies far more than 60 seconds.
I don’t need to know the chance of A or B changing lanes before they reach the intersection. I only need to know the chance that they would foolishly decide to go ahead and do so AFTER they saw me pull into the far right lane. I certainly have time to pull into the right lane before A or B reach the intersection. At that point, I’ll be accelerating. By the time they reach me, a good two or three seconds will have elapsed, plenty of time for them to see me and react.
But we don’t need to speculate about the motives and actions of A and B. We can simply observe the fact that “a car goes through an intersection” is an event which happens billions of times every single day and only a few thousand of those events result in crashes, which means the odds that a given car will have an accident at a given intersection are millions to one against. I estimated that making a right on red might increase the risk by a factor of 100. Can you make the case it’s not a factor of 100 but should be more like a factor of 10,000?
Time is money. Any honest risk/benefit analysis takes this into account. The standard procedure is to value your leisure time at half the rate you earn at your job. If you earn $10 per hour at work, then your leisure time is worth $5 per hour (about 8 cents per minute). It doesn’t matter how I plan it. Sitting an extra 1 minute at a traffic light takes 1 minute off my life. Either I left early (which means I lost some leisure time) or I didn’t leave early (which means I’m late for work). Either way, time is money.
If the responses to this thread are any indication, most drivers don’t take the risk, which reduces the chances of an accident. If almost everyone did do it, the chances would significantly increase.
I don’t know where you live, but when I commuted there was significant variance in the time required to get to work, even in the 99.99% of the time when I was not involved in an accident. If the cost of being late was great enough to force you to take the risk, you would have already paid it (by being fired) the first time two bozos had an accident in front of you and blocked traffic.
Your analysis also does not include that your insurance premiums might increase substantially if you get into this accident where you are at fault. And most people don’t want to pay extra for a very small $100 deductible anyway.
You are also not counting repair costs for the other car, and the time you’d need to take off from work to deal with the body shop.
Bottom line, the extra time you’d have to wait is well within the margin you’d need to allow anyhow, and probably less than just missing a green light. I trust you are a red light runner to save time, or a high speed weaver - both of whom might use your analysis to justify their behavior.
How fast are the cars coming at you? In the scenario I have to deal with, they’re flying at me at 50+ mph, so the cars just entering the intersection when I make my decision to turn aren’t the ones I have to worry about. It’s the ones a few car lengths back that could easily change lanes into the right hand lane before the intersection as I’m making my turn, and not have time to stop before they crunch me.
It would be the least of my worries afterwards, but I’d get the ticket for failure to yield right of way.
I don’t think we’ve established that it would be my fault. The right lane is clear, I make a right on red, and then AFTER I do that, a car changes lanes and hits me. IMHO it would be the other car’s fault. But okay, let’s suppose the insurance company disagrees and decides to raise my premiums. I’ll add an extra $40 per month for three years, total $1,440.
I most certainly did include the repairs of the other car. My exact words were, “That would cost me $100 (my insurance deductible) plus $10 for an hour’s wages (and a similar amount for the other person) plus a $200 ticket. Multiply 0.001% times $420 and I’m gambling .0042 dollars (just under half a cent).” I counted $100 for my car plus $10 for my wages, plus $100 for the other car plus $10 for that driver’s wages, plus $200 for a ticket. 100+10+100+10+200=420.
Okay, let’s make it $1,000 deductible on the other car.
Fair enough, add another two hours off of work for me, and the other driver, four hours total $40.
Now we’ve got 1440+100+10+1000+10+200+40=2800. Multiply that by 0.001% and I’m gambling 2.8 cents. That’s still smaller than what I lose by sitting still for sixty seconds, which is either 8 cents or 17 cents depending on whether you count leisure time or work time, and you still have to multiply by the number of cars: my car plus the cars waiting in line behind me. The cost is still smaller than the benefit, even after adding in all those numbers you suggested.
That still doesn’t change the fact that time is money. Adjust the travel time up or down as much or as little as you see fit so that you get to work on time or early. Time still equals money. The more time you spend commuting, the less time you have for other things.
People who want to run red lights or weave at high speed are welcome to do their own cost/benefit analysis and reach their own conclusions.
However, the cost/benefit analysis is only part of the decision. I believe that making a right on red is permissible if the right lane is clear at the time. It’s okay to make a right on red. If someone hit me afterwards, I think it would be their fault not mine. The obvious follow-up question is, “Even though right-on-red is permissible, would it be wiser to just wait?”. That’s the question I was attempting to answer. I did the math and I concluded that waiting costs more than not waiting. But I wouldn’t even bother doing that calculation if I had already decided that it would definitely be my fault because it was blatantly breaking the law. Running a red light is blatantly breaking the law. It would take a lot to convince me to run a red light because running a red light is wrong and I would feel guilty about doing it.
This, plus if I was in C, I’d get a bit nervous seeing a right-turner starting to move, not knowing for sure whether he is going to stay in the right lane or not. Figuring others would feel the same, I would stay put in the blue car.
The laws I’ve seen say right turn on red is permissible if it is safe to do so. If you get hit by someone, it is not safe. I wouldn’t bet that the insurance company would see it your way - especially if they figure out that you think this is a good strategy to pursue, and thus are more at risk for a repeat accident than someone else.
You don’t personally pay for the other driver’s repairs, so I was speaking in terms of economic cost in general, not out of your pocket. If someone who causes a crash tryiin to save a minute or two instead delays 500 drivers half an hour each (I’ve seen that happen) he is hurting society as a whole.
Time is money in the broader economic sense, but they are not psychologically equivalent. Do you really feel richer if you ge thome ten minutes early? Poorer if you are stuck in traffic? If you got to work 10 minutes early, and could only clock in at your normal time, are you better off?
In any case my point was that the variance in commute times is so great that the benefits of this strategy will be lost in the noise. Now, if waiting might make you miss a flight, I can see taking the risk. Just not normally.
Bujt their basic argument would look the same as yours. They probably put a higher value on their time and are more confident that they can do it safely.
What you are proposing is nowhere near as wrong as running a red light. But it is not driving defensively, and especially if changing lanes in an intersection were legal, it would be breaking the law in the respect of turning into an unsafe situation.
But it is hardly the biggest issue on our roads. There are plenty of people who turn right on red without stopping who are worse.
That’s assuming you aren’t concentrating on changing the lanes and don’t even notice the right turner, who you might assume is going to stay put.
My first reaction was, “Excellent! I’m glad to see that we share the same premise, which is that the gains must be weighed against the losses, and we should look at the big picture.” But then it occurred to me that your statement greatly depends on the probability of the crash.
500 cars times 30 minutes each is 15,000 total minutes. Would I risk 15,000 of anything (trying to gain just 1 or 2) on a roll of the dice? That depends entirely on the dice. Tell you what. I’ll hand you eight six-sided dice. You pay me $2. If you roll all twos on the first roll, I’ll give you $15,000. Is that a good bet for me? Yep, it sure is. Because the Expected Value is in my favor.
Expected Value = win * Prob(win) - loss * Prob(loss).
In this case, the probability that I will lose is 1/1,679,616 and the probability that I will win is 1,679,615/1,679,616. So my Expected Value is
EV = $2 * (1679615/1679616) - $15000 * 1/1679616 which equals about $1.99 for me.
That’s very very good. Anything above zero means the game is tilted in my favor. $1.99 means I basically get to keep almost all of your money. If a million people pay me $2 each to play this game, I expect to take in $2,000,000 and only pay out $15,000 maybe once. That’s wonderful for me. I will gladly take that bet. I’ll let you play as many times as you like.
The tipping point is when win * Prob(win) = loss * Prob(loss).
If I can win 2 but I could lose 15,000, then the tipping point happens when the probability is 1/7500.
So your statement is true if the probability of a crash was higher than 1/7500. But I don’t think it’s that high. If it were, then we’d be seeing a lot more crashes than what actually happens. My estimate of the danger is 1/100,000 and I think that’s a conservative number. The actual danger is very likely smaller than that.
I prefer to do the calculation with dollars instead of minutes. That way, we can include not just the time gained vs the time lost but also the damage to the cars, etc. We need a conversion rate for minutes to dollars. I suggested 17 cents per minute, which is approximately $10 per hour. I suggested the time gained is just 1 minute, not two. What’s the Expected Value for in dollars? The amount we win by turning right on red is 17 cents times N (the number of cars lined up trying to turn right on red). The amount we lose by having a crash is an unknown number L. The Expected Value is:
EV = .17N * (99,999/100,000) - L * 1/100,000.
Notice that fraction in parentheses is .99999, which is essentially the same thing as 1.0 for this calculation. So
EV = .17N - L * 1/100,000
This will be a positive number as long as L < 17,000 * N
In other words, the benefits outweigh the cost unless the amount lost by a crash is more than $17,000 times N. I estimated the cost of a crash at $2,800. But it doesn’t matter if you use $3,000 or $5,000 or whatever, it’s still a lot lower than $17,000 times N. My $2,800 didn’t include the traffic delays resulting from a crash. 500 drivers being delayed at 17 cents per minute comes to 585 per minute. Adding that onto the $2,800 I already calculated won’t change the outcome. You’d have to get the cost of the crash up to $17,000 in order to outweigh the benefit of turning right to save time. Most traffic delays are seconds, not minutes. But even if the entire highway came to a dead stop for a full 30 minutes, that’s only $2,550. Still not enough to change the EV from positive to negative. And that’s $17,000 for just one car waiting to turn right on red. If there’s multiple cars, then it’s $17,000 per car before the cost/benefit calculation swings the other way.
I’m glad you agree.
How does it make me feel? Honestly, I feel really annoyed when I’m sitting behind someone who COULD turn right on red but WON’T. This is especially true for me when (as I said in my previous post) there are multiple lanes and the timid person in front won’t turn into far right lane despite the fact that their lane is clear and the lane next to it is also clear. I feel happy when I think about a short commute and sad when I think about a long one. Just how happy or how sad is impossible to quantify.
The whole point of why I brought up the cost/benefit analysis was to try to take the emotions out of it. Humans often make bad decisions based on emotions. One person says their emotions tell them to make a right on red. Another person says their emotions tell them not to make a right on red. Emotions are not a reliable way to get to the truth. Ask people who join crazy cults if they feel happy. That doesn’t make them right. Luckily, we have math. My math shows that the benefit outweighs the risk (assuming 30 mph street and multiple cars lined up to turn right). Show me your math which says otherwise.
Who are you people who make turns by closing your eyes and gunning it? Do you just say “Whelp, I’m going” and take your hands off the wheel, put on a blindfold, and just jam the accelerator?
Start your turn. If someone approaching changes lanes into you, stop your turn. They don’t teleport. They don’t disappear and suddenly reappear on your bumper. Watch them. It’s not that f’ing hard.
I do this all the time with LEFT turns from stop signs. You need one lane, that’s it.
Is this a symptom of mental faculties declining with age? Is it just that you can’t concentrate on two things at the same time, so you can’t navigate a 90-degree turn without losing understanding of your surroundings? Serious question.
All risks of not turning if I’m behind you and it’s rush hour. Since you’re not going, I have plenty of time to get my tire iron from the trunk. GO!
Honestly, it’s not even the people going straight through that you need to worry about. It’s the people turning left-on-green from the opposite direction who think they have right-of-way into any lane they choose, instead of the lane closest to them, like the law says.