Here is the intersection in question:
One can switch to street view to see how it appears as you drive. It seems to want everyone to make right turns, but nothing seems wrong about going straight of left, just inconvenient due to those lines if one doesn’t drive over them, which is often done but with sharp turns not impossible.
Any clue of what is disallowed if anything here? In some ways it seems it would work as a very sharped angled traffic circle.
this looks like a really large intersection and the road painters were trying to Define where the lanes go. Maybe someone had planned to install a planter there.
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Looks like they’re discouraging a left turn onto Paddock if you’re northbound on Oakwood.
Funny that the dump-bed truck (or whatever it is) you see on the street view actually makes a left-hand turn there (or he is doing an impressive job of backing).
Drive Like Hell is Catching Up With You!
That was my first thought as well; almost as if the intention is for you to treat the lines as a concrete island/barrier.
There was an intersection like that, in the place where I grew up and learned to drive, years ago. And it had a triangular-shaped island in the middle. And was unsigned (no stop signs, no yield signs, etc.).
You simply dealt. If you wanted to turn left, you slowed before the intersection, looked, and if all was clear, you slipped left, and took the shortest path between two points. If it was not (say, oncoming traffic was heading towards you in your left lane), you just yielded and waited.
It was no use trying to use it as a traffic circle, or roundabout. It was too tight, and your car would inevitably hump over the island. Thankfully, it was in the middle of a residential area, not commonly travelled except by local residents, and everybody local knew how to navigate it.
That’s how it looks to me, as well. As kopek notes, it looks like it’s meant to be treated as a traffic barrier / island with no actual barrier.
kanicbird, the striped lines are supposed to discourage traffic from driving on that part so it’s basically a painted island instead of a physical island. It’s used to define lanes of travel at an intersection.
The Uniform Manual on Traffic Controls calls them “Diagonal Cross Hatch Markings” and says they “may be used to discourage travel on certain paved areas, such as… channelized travel paths at intersections.” See p. 395 of the pdf below. https://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/pdfs/2009r1r2/mutcd09r1r2editionhl.pdf
The basic idea is to separate traffic traveling in different directions to reduce the chance of collision. If there were no markings, people taking a left from that road would wind up in the middle of the intersection, right where people taking a left onto that road would be aiming. With how casually people treat stop signs, you could expect a fair number of collisions.
This one is defective though because it should be yellow. Cross hatch markings like the ones in the picture separate traffic travelling in different directions, and they should always be yellow. White chevrons (painted stick-figure arrow heads, essentially) are supposed to separate traffic travelling in the same direction and they should be white. White cross hatches are an error.
Yes on the first part but not on the second part. Cross hatch markings are cheap and generally intended to be permanent. Painted lines require less maintenance than planters and painted lines allow fire trucks to turn around. Many city codes for construction of subdevelopments require wide roads for ease of use by large fire trucks. Tom Vanderbilt, author of “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and what it says about us)” (here:https://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says-About/dp/0307277194) believes that when suburban roads accommodate large fire trucks, you wind up with wider roads and gentler curves, which in turns leads to higher speeds and more collisions for fire departments to respond to.
They should have signs and/or road markings prohibiting left turns if that was their intent. I don’t think that was what they wanted to do.
Yup.
It looks to me like Oakwood is a narrow residential road that is not quite wide enough for 2 vehicles travelling in opposite directions to safely navigate. The gore area directs drivers to turn right on Oakwood to avoid a potential head on or sideswipe accident.
There are no signs indicating that Oakwood Blvd. is one-way and the OP didn’t say that it’s one way. There are also no signs indicating you can’t take a left at the stop sign at the end of Paddock Place.
The north part of Oakwood appears to be 24 feet wide when I measure it with on the Google satellite photo. (When I measure my own roof with the same tool, it comes out to within one foot of the actual dimension). I guess if everyone in the neighborhood is driving a Caterpillar 770G, you’d be right that it’s too narrow for two-way traffic.
Also, if the island is directing traffic onto the south side of Oakwood, it is directing it to the much narrower part of the road where it also appears there will be oncoming traffic. There are no “Do not enter,” “One way,” or “No left (or right) turn” signs at the end of the block that would limit traffic coming onto Oakwood Blvd. toward Paddock Place.
The street I live on is 18’ wide, regularly has parked cars on both sides, and carries two-way traffic. People can navigate it just fine.
To answer some of the above, all roads are 2 way, there is no signs restricting turns or directions, there is room on all roads for 2 cars to safely pass each other. Also if you check the street view one can make out that the stripes used to be yellow.
It would make more sense if the line that goes across one of the lanes - presumably a Give Way marker - were at the bottom vertex of the triangle.
That line is undoubtedly a “stop here” line, which commonly (but not always) accompanies stop signs in the U.S. If you go to the Google Street View for the intersection, you’ll see that eastbound Paddock has a stop sign, and, in fact, there’s a truck stopped at that line. It’s placed as far back as it is almost undoubtedly because of where Oakwood is running. If that line was at the “bottom vertex”, it’d be halfway out into Oakwood, and a car stopped at that line would be blocking southbound Oakwood. Placed that far back, it ensures that cars (if they stop where they’re supposed to) will have stopped before entering the intersection.
Since there’s apparently no prohibition to left turns at the intersection, the shape of the marking (especially the pointy bit that extends to the northeast) doesn’t make a lot of sense. And, you can see, from the overhead view, that the striping is worn exactly where you’d expect it to be worn if people were cutting over it in order to turn left from northbound Oakwood onto Paddock.
All in all, this strikes me as a bit of pavement painting that was not designed by a traffic engineer.
It looks like they couldn’t decide whether to forbid left turns or not. They shaped the island to guide a vehicle toward the right, but did not include the double yellow stripes that would make it an impassable median. (MUTCD would not have said ‘discourage’ when they meant ‘forbid’.) They also didn’t paint a right turn arrow on the street and they didn’t put up a right turn only sign.
If I got a ticket for turning left there, I’d fight the ticket.
I saw a marking like this yesterday at a roundabout.