How you Should Drive on Roads with Center Left Turn Lanes.

How you Should Drive on Roads with Center Left Turn Lanes. 

 In large parts of the country, most of the roads you encounter will be roads with what are called Center Left Turn Lanes. The picture below illustrates one of these kinds of roads. That lane in the center, bounded by the solid yellow lines on the outside and the dashed broken lines on the inside is what’s called a Center Left Turn Lane:

The purpose of these lanes is to begin, or end, left turns, as illustrated by this drawing taken from a Road Markings Page on the University of Wisconsin’s website. This drawing shows how these lanes are supposed to be used. See how there is a lane in the center, and how the car that turned left from a side street into  the main street ended his left turn in that lane? At the same time, the car on the left is beginning his left turn by getting into the lane so he can turn left into another side street.

Both of these are perfectly legal turns, and are done thousands of times a day all over America. What this article is going to focus on though, is the first situation I described above, ending a left turn in the lane, and when you should do it, and shouldn’t do it.

I know what you’re thinking. Didn’t I just say that the Center Left Turn Lane is for starting and ENDING left turns? If so, why shouldn’t it be used all the time? That is a great question, and one I plan to answer right now. Before I do though, I want you to put yourself in the place of a driver who has to deal with a car in that lane. Take a look at the picture below. (On a potential positive note, I tried to find an image of a car stopped in a Center Left Turn Lane, and could not find one on Google, so maybe most people are using them properly!) We have a white car, apparently stopped in the Center Left Turn Lane to either make a turn, or to merge with traffic to the right of him (I’ll touch on merging a bit later).  Let’s assume that this road is a major road where the speed limit is 50 MPH. Place yourself in the lane to the right of the car in the center lane. If you are that driver, you will be approaching that car doing 45 MPH or better, and you will pass within two to three feet of that car. Do you know why that car is there? Do you know for sure where that driver is going? No. All you know is that you have a car whose direction and motive you can only guess at, a mere few feet from your car.  Now let’s imagine that you are the driver of the black car, which is approaching the white car going the opposite direction. Do you know where this white car is going, or whey they are in the center lane? No. All you know is that there is a car there, and you will be passing within three to five feet of him going 45 MPH or better. How comfortable do you think you’d be driving around a car like that?

Another thing people do is use the lanes to merge into traffic. It goes something like this. A driver is trying to pull into traffic from either a side street or a parking lot. Traffic either won't let that driver in, or they don't want to wait, so he or she is having a hard time finding an opening to get through. So what they will do is when there is an opening to get into the Center Left Turn Lane, they take it, pull into the lane, and start driving in that lane like it’s another lane. Then they get over when they can, normally into a space that was made because the driver closest to them got freaked out at what they were doing and slowed down.

As you can imagine, there are huge problems with this. First off, it’s illegal.  True, there are some cities, like Phoenix, Arizona, where the center lane is what’s called a Reversible Lane, meaning that the lane  goes one direction in the morning, and the other in the afternoon, but these lanes are rare, and are VERY well marked when they occur. For most places though, if you drive through an opening in a Center Left Turn Lane, (the openings occur when there is an intersection of some kind) you are driving illegally. Some people though, especially if it’s busy, will drive in that lane for quite a while. One busy day I remember seeing someone drive in one of those lanes for almost a quarter of a mile before they made a very risky move and got into traffic. Bottom line, do not use these lanes to merge in that way under any circumstances.

So how do you use these lanes safely? Let me bring back the second image I used earlier:

The way the red car is using the lane is ALWAYS appropriate. He is starting a left turn from that lane, therefore taking him or herself out of traffic while they wait to turn left. This is the primary use for these lanes. As I said earlier, you can use these lanes to end left turns, but I would only do this under heavy traffic conditions. True, you should wait for traffic to clear and just make your turn into the proper lane, but I called this blog Real World Driving, and that is just not real world. What I normally do is wait a couple of minutes (and no, not what feels like a couple of minutes, but was really 20 seconds, but a legitimate two or three minutes for traffic to clear) to see if traffic will allow me in. Sometimes you’ll get lucky, and get in right away, sometimes you have to wait. If traffic is heavy, you’ll likely be waiting.  So after waiting for a couple of minutes, if I see that traffic is not letting up, and that I will likely be waiting for a long time, I will make a left turn into the Center Left Turn Lane, and then, I will STOP with my right turn signal flashing, indicating that I intend to merge into traffic. I will stay there, stopped, until an opening comes up, and then I get into the opening as quickly as possible. Note,  that I didn’t say anything about driving in the middle lane. Note that I have my blinker on, showing the drivers around me what I plan to do. Note that I don’t stay in that middle lane and check my texts or call my girlfriend and see what’s for dinner. Get in the lane, and get out, that is the story. But this is a rare occasion, and something I might do once or twice a year. The rest of the time, I don’t use the lane to end my turns, I wait for the opening and enter traffic when it's safe.

Center Left Turn Lanes are a great thing, and if you’ve ever driven on a very rural road, or an older part of a city that has older streets where you have to start and wait to turn left from an actual traffic lane, you know how safe, valuable, and convenient they are. That being said, they have an ulterior purpose, and that is to create a buffer between the two traffic flows. This makes people feel safer, calms them down, and allows them to drive in a way that is much more stress free. But put a car in that lane that is normally a buffer, and you have just made those drivers revert back to 1930s highways with only yellow markings for barriers.  If you need to use the lane, use them, that’s what they are there for, but get out of them as quickly as you can. Until next time….