Ah, yes, the wonderful “jughandle”. Grew up with them in NJ. I miss them sometimes, because too mant other places don’t have a civilized way to allow you to turn left. If they don’t have a designated Left Turn Lane and a speciual Left Turn gren arrow, you’re often screwed. Jughandles definitely let you make the turn. They also are great in high-traffic areas, where you get a lot of left-hand turners, and a designated “left turn lane” would get swamped. Therer’s a huge circular jughandle in East Brunswick NJ that is a perfect example.
It’s been mentioned that they have them south of Boston on US 1. North of Boston, too – there’s one in Peabody, MA, too. (Although I note that last night it was closed. I hope that’s not permanent.)
Michigan resident here. Yes, they are useful in some cases but they are tiring sometimes. They are everywhere around here and sometimes I find myself just wishing I could turn left like a regular person. They can be confusing to people coming from out of state, when I give directions to people I have to tell them to turn left, but you have to go through the intersection first and then turn around and come back, or turn right to turn left. You’ll often see an out of state plate waiting at a light to turn left with traffic honking behind him - they just assume the left lane is the place to turn left.
In high traffic areas they can get things moving better, but woe to you if you don’t know where you’re going and have to turn around and come back. It can get confusing.
Nametag: what Colophon and Loach said. I forgot to mention the accompanying traffic lights, sorry. (A jughandle definitely wouldn’t make much sense on highway 1 if there wasn’t a traffic light too!)
Heard about these many a time, and I wish we had them in San Francisco. However, the two things we don’t have are left turns and land, so we have to be happy with going around the block to make a left.
I think making a right-left-left should be called a San Francisco Left Turn. If you’ve ever taken 19th Avenue, you know exactly what I mean.
Oh! So that’s what all the fuss is about! I know those things, and I really thought they were an awesome solution to the left-turn-lane problem. I’d never seen them in the USA before, but they’re quite popular in Mexico.
Of course in Mexico you’re not supposed to turn left off of a rural highway period. You’re supposed to pull into the right shoulder, and wait for traffic going both ways to stop before making the left turn. That way you don’t hold up anyone behind you. Seems silly to me – I was there first. But the jug-handles are neat.
My parents learned to drive in Ohio. Assuming the driving age was then 16 or 18 (and I seem to recall the latter), this would have been around 1935-40. They told me the way you turned left at an intersection with a light was to get to the right and pull in in front of the traffic waiting in the cross street. The you wnet through the light when it turned green. They moved away for 1943-6 and seem to recall the situation changed while they were gone.
This wouldn’t work too well nowadays with many more cars wanting to turn left. The jughandles seem to be a solution to this problem. The pictures shown, however, seem to show a T intersection not a four way intersection. I don’t quite see how it works and a four way intersection.
Hey, Velma, I don’t know which part of Michigan you’re from, but we do have something similar here at at least one intersection. Seeing the images above kind of jarred my memory. Plus it seems so damn wierd.
If you’re going on sb Telegraph and want to hit eb Ford, you’ve got to merge off Telegraph toward to west; cross wb Ford toward the south and merge rightward onto eb Ford. Here’s a photo of the intersection.
It’s not a Michigan left, and it’s probably not exactly a tea pot handle thing either. It almost is, though, except that instead of going straight, you go left, to the east.
I kinda miss jughandles. When I first moved out of NJ and experienced true left turns for the first time (I was 27), I was so afraid, I’d make a right turn onto a cross street, turn around, and make my left. I got over my fear, but all in all, I still like jughandles. That very same year I learned how to pump gas.
I’ve definitely seen them in parts of PA, but couldnt really figure out how they were an improvement to making a left turn lane…I guess in a narrow 4 lane highway you wouldnt want to distort the direction of the road by inserting a left hand turn lane, but these were hardly high-traffic areas I saw them in.
“Michigan lefts”, OTOH, I’ve seen in the Alexandria part of the DC area. Or maybe they were just interlocking streets with NO turns allowed at all They are tons more confusing than jughandles IMO
I recently spent a couple of days in Pittsburgh on business and my coworker and I were “initiated” into the concept of the downtown Pitt one way streets (with no turns, I believe) that actually have traffic moving counter to the direction of the one-way…but it is a lane for buses only. Made me realize that often I’m not necessarily reading signs posted at an intersection, but watching for what other traffic is doing. So we turned left behind a bus on a clear green and proceeded to be scowled at and jeered untill we could turn right out of the lane we had so thoroughly violated.
They are tons more confusing than jughandles IMO