I hate to pick on my old friends at Mother Jones, but Abigail Weinberg recently posted a story about right-turn-on-red (RTOR), a longtime staple of California roads that expanded to most of the country 50 years ago. It's received wisdom on the left these days that roads are for bicycles, not cars, so naturally the conclusion of the piece is right in the headline:
It’s Time to Ban “Right Turn on Red”
It’s an obsolete relic of the 1970s oil crisis. It’s dangerous to pedestrians. And, if you drive a car in the United States, you likely do it every day. It’s time to get rid of right-turn-on-red.
....The data on right-turn-on-red crashes might be scarce, but the existing studies suggest that these types of collisions—while rare—frequently involve a pedestrian or cyclist. Cars, instead of hitting other cars, often hit humans. Now, there’s a growing movement for cities to do away with the traffic law altogether.
Last week, the Washington, DC, city council voted to ban right-turn-on-red (RTOR) at most city intersections....Critics of the DC bill have pointed out the lack of data showing the dangers of RTOR, but many people who don’t use cars know instinctively how dangerous turning vehicles can be. “Our current safety studies fail to capture the reality of the constant near misses and confrontations that result between these motorists and pedestrians which can be observed daily just by observing a typical busy intersection with RTOR,” [Bill] Schultheiss says.
This is a single-source story featuring a bicycle expert named Bill Schultheiss who very obviously has a point of view to press. Because of that, he apparently didn't mention that although data on RTOR is thin, it's not nonexistent. Here's what a ten-minute Google search turned up:
- 1995: National, NHTSA, 1982-92. There were a total of 0-84 RTOR fatalities, probably toward the lower end of that range. About half involved pedestrians (44%) or bicyclists (10%). Roughly, then, there are probably 2-3 RTOR fatalities per year involving pedestrians and bicyclists.
- 2002: San Francisco, Fleck & Yee, 1956, 1994-96. This is a review of two existing studies. RTOR collisions are a tiny fraction (<1%) of all right-turn collisions. The accident rate is lower than right-turn-on-green. In addition, two other papers reviewing different states show no detectable change in right-turn injury rates before and after RTOR was adopted.
- 2008: Connecticut, Office of Legislative Research, 1994-2006. Out of 663 total fatalities, four were at RTOR intersections, all involving pedestrians or bicyclists. That's one fatality every three years. Of those, one involved a drunk bicyclist, one involved a wheelchair user who crossed against the signal; and one involved a bicyclist who failed to yield when he should have.
- 2009: New York City, NYDOT, 2006-08. This is a study of injuries before and after RTOR was allowed at specific intersections. Conclusion: "Accident rates not affected." About a third of injuries involved pedestrians (25%) or bicyclists (4%).
As a born-and-bred Californian, I naturally think of RTOR as God's will. Still, I don't have any special axe to grind here. I just think those of us who write about public policy—even if it's advocacy journalism—have an obligation to perform at least a minimal bit of research before we come out with guns blazing. It may be that there's some concrete evidence out there showing that RTOR really should be banned, but the research I could find shows just the opposite. RTOR doesn't seem to make more than a sliver of difference one way or the other.
Other than kids riding around neighborhoods, I could probably do a week's worth of driving and not see a bicyclist on a main road.
The problem I used to have with bicyclists back in my days of living in Massachusetts was that they were the only mode of transportation that was legally allowed to use all three sets of "infrastructure" (road, bike lane, pedestrian walk). Now, technically when in each they were supposed to obey the rules for that mode of transport. If on the road, behave like a car. If on the sidewalk/crosswalk behave like a pedestrian. My major problem with them was that they would typically switch between these three different sets of infrastructure far faster than they would switch their behavior, if they switched their behavior at all.
Twenty years of living there, the one time we had an accident with a bicyclist was when my wife was driving, and doing a right turn on green. As she rounded the corner, a pedestrian jumped off the sidewak in front of her, so she stopped. The bicyclist speeding up her right side in the bike lane didn't see the pedestrian, assumed (wrongly) that she was going to smoothly go through the turn, and rear-ended the car.
I've seen a lot of near misses over those years, and invariably it was either the car driver doing something stupid or the bicyclist doing something stupid, or both. But I can't say it was any more correlated with a right on red than a right on green, or left on green, or one person or another running a changing yellow or full on red. Mostly it was folks just not paying attention when they should have been.
I do a lot of bike riding and walking and RTOR is a minor problem. IMHO the biggest is cellphone distraction and nothing seems to be done. Police could simply stand at any intersection and ticket people all day for staring at their phones instead of the road or cyclists or pedestrians. Of course police drivers are among the worst offenders.
As a New York transplant currently soaking up the sunshine in the Golden State, I've always been amazed at how lightly traffic laws here are enforced. I think that I'd like Right Turn on Red a little better if the common understanding here wasn't "I can turn right on red while I'm cruising through the light even if I have to make everyone slam on their brakes to let me in because I'm special, dammit!" For some silly reason, I always come to a full stop and only turn if traffic allows it... which is why all those people behind me honk. But, again, as a former New Yorker, horn honking has no effect on me.
"Silly reason": This is the law on right turns: Stop, look, then drive on if possible. Nothing silly about it.
The concern is more about pedestrians and cyclists. But it isn't as if nobody told them about RTOR. They are careful themselves for the most part. You have to be stupid to cross a street on green without checking. There are drivers who run red lights.
As a bicyclist myself with experience in both European and American cities (and also Taipei) I say bullshit.
Right turns are always dangerous to bicyclists, at red lights or at green lights, with or without RTOR and even with or without signal lights at all. The car on your left may turn suddenly and force you to try to escape sideways.
We need to use our brains and not assume that what we don't see (like behind a bus or SUV) does not exist. We have an advantage in that regard: Thanks to us sitting higher than most drivers there are fewer hidden zones for us. Use it and pay attention at every right turn opportunity, especially if you want to go straight!
The problem with using 2009 data is that's the all time low of pedestrian deaths, from there pedestrian fatalities have gone up every year. The problem now is that vehicles are bigger, with higher grills, larger blind spots, weigh more and accelerate faster. That's likely going to be made worse by electrification. Trucks in general are so much worse at causing cyclist and pedestrian deaths, trucks with commercial or government plates have caused around half of the deaths around here even though they are not that many vehicles. Finally it doesn't really make sense to set the rules statewide, there are lots of cities that banning right on red would save multiple lives and not affect traffic since all the cars would be turning and then waiting for another whole light cycle on the next block but only annoy the suburbs without likely preventing an accident 20 miles away.
Almost run over today by a RTOR car. Stopped just short of stepping off the curb, even though I had the green and the car had a “no turn on red” sign, because I saw out of the corner of my eye that the car wasn’t slowing down and the driver was looking to the left and not looking right at all.
Another successful datapoint proving Kevin’s theory that “RTOR isn’t dangerous to pedestrians (as long as they can see)!”