Turning Right on a Red is Weird...

Not every place allows it, but plenty do in the world, and every state generally allows it, but why?

You probably don’t think about it much, but did you know that you can make a right turn on a red light legally in every single state in the country? That little fact might not be all that surprising because it’s baked into our national subconscious, but it’s still a bit of an oddball traffic law that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense today. Currently, within the United States, the only place you can’t make a right turn on a red light is New York City unless there’s a sign explicitly allowing it. As it turns out, disallowing it makes a whole lot more sense because it’s actually quite dangerous for pedestrians and bicyclists (of which New York City has quite a bit!).

Why Do We Turn Right on Red?

Before we dive into some safety statistics, I figured a little bit of a history lesson was in order. Despite Americans taking for granted their legality in turning right on a red light, it wasn’t a thing until the 1970s when an international oil crisis caused huge shortages in gasoline. Allowing right turns on red lights, in this context, was considered to be a tool to help stave off the amount of gas wasted by idling at stop lights. In fact, in 1975, Congress passed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act which made it mandatory for states to allow right turns on red lights, or go without some federal funding. Suffice it to say, every state legalized right turns on red lights shortly after.

Today, obviously, there’s no real gas shortage and gas prices are relatively low overall. Not to mention that modern vehicles don’t waste nearly as much gasoline idling as they did in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Suffice it to say, there’s no real need to allow right turns on red lights from an energy perspective.

Safety

While there may have been a valid energy-conservation reason for allowing right turns on red in the 1970s - I’m not an expert and my historical knowledge only goes so far - there’s a really great reason to get rid of the legality of it entirely: pedestrian and bicyclist safety. Essentially, it’s been determined by study after study that the adoption of a right turn on red law showed marked increases in pedestrian and bicyclist crashes. And this isn’t new information either, a federal study in 1981 showed these same trends:

Estimates of the magnitude of the increases ranged from 43% to 107% for pedestrian accidents and 72% to 123% for bicyclist accidents.

And why do right turn on red lights cause more pedestrian and bicyclists crashes? Quite simply it’s because the driver is literally looking the opposite way when they make their turn. Let’s illustrate this a bit:

This is a little doodle I created. Basically we can see that a car turning right on a red light is looking to the left got oncoming traffic in order to find their “window.” In this scenario, it’s fine because the driver is making their turn before the green light changes, and the pedestrian is still waiting on the curb for their turn to cross. But what happens if the green light does change:

At this point the driver is now turning into the crosswalk while a pedestrian is crossing. They’re still looking left because they’re not focused on the light and whether it’s red or green - it doesn’t matter too much to them after all. So they see that they have a window of opportunity to make the turn not knowing that a pedestrian is now crossing and… boom. The car crashes into the pedestrian. If you at all walk around your city consistently, you’ll no doubt have had these feelings of whether a car making a right turn has seen you and whether they’ll attempt a quick turn into you. True story: I’ve actually been hit by a car making this exact movement!

Left Turns on Red

As if turning right on red wasn’t already a bit of a headache, most states also allow some form of turning left on a red light. Now this is always from a one-way street, but it can vary depending on the road the car is turning onto. For example, in my home state of Oregon, in downtown Portland where there’s quite a lot of pedestrians (pre-pandemic) it’s perfectly legal for a car to turn left from a one-way street onto a two-way street with a red light. That means crossing an oncoming lane of traffic into your lane of direction. That’s a lot to ask of a driver to keep in mind, especially with pedestrians around to also keep track of.

What About the World?

It’s a little mixed on whether the rest of the world has adopted similar right turn on red laws. In North America it’s a pretty dominant traffic law. Europe, not so much.

In many ways, I see this as a reflection of the transportation values a country has. In the United States, for example, we’re a car country. While we have public transit, and people do walk and bike, it’s not prioritized by any meaningful measure. Instead we spend billions on car infrastructure and ensuring cars get to where they need to go as fast as possible. Saudi Arabia and China are probably similar in these ways. Europe, on the other hand, is more focused on multiple methods of transportation and they take this into account with their laws.

And so that’s it. I really don’t expect “right on red” laws to disappear anytime soon. It’s not a priority and, even though they do have safety issues, the overall amount of crashes related to a vehicle turning right on a red light is fairly low. Still, those are entirely preventable crashes that we have opted into simply to speed traffic up by a few seconds. Priorities are weird when it comes to traffic laws in the USA.

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I hope you enjoyed this week’s article. This was a little wonkier of a topic than normal. It’s partly influenced by my profession in transportation planning and engineering and partly influenced by my observations as a frequent pedestrian through my city. Next week I’ll be doing a multi-part series on the “11 Nations” theory of the United States with maps and data, of course. Should be really interesting! Thanks for reading!