More accurately...you're the gray car wanting to turn right, but there is about 1/2-1/3 full car length in-between the black-green-white cars blocking the lane.
this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
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Just one more lane bro! That'll get rid of the traffic bro!
Read a book a few months ago by Tom Vanderbilt called traffic that was an academic look at the titular traffic and it showed negative returns on adding lanes.
Can you summarize the gist of it? I keep seeing this claim and it is extremely non-intuitive.
Supposing itβs true, how is it weβve magically arrived at the optimal number of lanes as of the uttering of the statement?
If itβs a basically linear function where the lowest traffic is near-zero lanes, is there an implication that mass transit would be built in tandem with lane reduction, or does everyone just get more miserable?
Edit: Iβll add that what Iβve heard is that more people choose to drive until the misery-equilibrium is reached. So roads will always be as busy as they are now because they are at their max tolerable level of drivability. That seems plausible for some roads and for some finite number of lanes, but not generally applicable.
Essentially you need all streets to be serviceable by trucks, ambulances, etc., and therefore the general minimum is 1 lane. As you add car infrastructure, it becomes relatively more convenient to drive to a destination than take other modes of transport. You are also typically investing in the car infrastructure at the expense of alternatives, a straight opportunity cost and a sort of spiralling trap, as development becomes more and more centred around the car.
Braess's paradox outlines adding a route can actually worsen overall network flow, and more broadly, new capacity just attracts new drivers until congestion returns to roughly where it started. Suboptimalities like the accordion effect are compounded as more traffic is added to the system.
Induced demand doesn't imply the current number of lanes is optimal, just that expansion tends to be self-defeating.
Lane reduction alone would just increase misery, so the answer is redirect road space into transit, which absorbs displaced drivers at higher capacity. Otherwise it's just misery.
I have a civil engineering degree with a focus on transport but never really used it for that, so this is something that I was taught, but had over a decade to devolve more into opinion.
Lane reduction alone would just increase misery...
Agreed, mostly. In my neighborhood (Grid system) they updated the 4-lane roads in the area to 2-lane roads with center turn lanes. It's made traffic much better, simply because there's no traffic waves created by people lane changing around people turning left.
I was at a traffic light with my support worker a few weeks ago, and this dumb fuck wasnβt on the sensor. He was sitting there for like ten minutes and wouldnβt move forward. My sw got out of that lane and went a different way. When we came back a couple mins later he was still there!
Oh no one car length of wait time
you mean a complete light cycle. at that point it dossent matter if they are one car length from being able to be in the right only lane, they might as well be 10 cars back
Valid point and raises the need to be closer to a red light π
This feels like an analogy for bike lanes.
No, the analogy for bike lanes would be what has been posted in another comment:
Right-turning cars typically have to cross the bikelanes going straight on, being one of the most dangerous situations for bicyclists and showing just how much of an afterthought the bikelanes are.
I once got stuck in a bus like this. I was 20 minutes early for my connection. I missed my connection.
Should have gotten on the right bus.
Man that's good.
This reads like a Mitch Hedberg joke.
One time, I was late for the bus. The schedule said I was also 20 minutes early for the bus. It seems to me there is an obvious disagreement in the late-slash-early status of the bus. This cannot be good for traffic. Someone should do something about this.
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Am I the only one deeply irritated that the left going lane has no arrows and no one is indicating left either?
This intersection really hurts my sense of order!
My headcanon is that the right turning person's blinker is the only one out of sync
Thanks, that idea has a certain beauty to it.
I will now adopt it and move closer to inner peace again!
Here, I fixed it. The person in the back row has their right blinker on so they can get into the left-turn only lane.
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Inaccurate. It's two cars with 1.5 car lengths in front of each.
You're right, this is worse.
So close. The first car is too close to the line.
I drive to patients homes all day and I daily see people in the suburbs stop far enough back that they don't always trip the left turn arrow, sometimes leaving that lane stuck an extra cycle. It would be infuriating, except that my drive time is paid and mileage reimbursed, so I've chosen not to let it bother me. I just roll my eyes and wait.
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Here in 'Merika, it would only take two cars to block the turning lane, because half of these morons are oblivious and/or on their goddam phones.
I thought you were going to say because the cars are the size of tanks.
Two cars or one stupidly oversized truck.
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As an aside, are there real L-shaped traffic light stacks? I've always seen them with the arrow at the bottom. The direction of the arrow makes it perfectly understandable without putting it off to the side. But I could imagine a traffic light company marketing these.
Idk, my city in UK has those, though it's usually backwards L for left turn.
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Man, I could have saved like ten, or even fifteen seconds if the infrastructure was bigger.
Where exactly are those cars heading? There's no road forward and only one lane to the right.
This would be much less of a problem if fewer people insisted on bringing their whole living room everywhere they go.
Americans have to have large cars because they are always 2 paychecks away from living in them
Canada, in a single image? I've driven cars in most European countries, Canada, US (small amount), Mexico.
Canada has the worst road designs of them all, though since almost everything here is modelled after the US, I guess it could still be worse there
I regularly see road situations where I can only wonder how high they were, what they were smoking, and where I can get some
Intersections where only one lane has traffic lights, the other doesn't. How are you supposed to cross that? Simple: you throw a hail Mary, close your eyes, andale a run for it while praying to some non-exist God. This is howy stepson got sideswiped, by a guy having to do exactly that.
Making a left turn in Canada? Great, you got green! Go? Well no, cars are still coming from the other side, they inexplicably got green too so now the intersection with traffic lights also acts as an intersection without traffic lights. Amazing designs!
But wait, there is more!
Once those cars from the other side are gone, you might be tempted to think that you can now just drive, but noooooooh, this is Canada! Pedestrians also got green so now you need to try and avoid those too if you can. The amount of near misses that I've had and that I've seen with others is staggering, crossing roads in Canada is fucking dangerous.
All this adds up to that going left basically means that you get green light and you can't do shit until it gets orange, then you quickly squeeze yourself through and pray that you didn't murder a school class by accident.
This, in turn, means that going to the left is an exercise in patience, because each green red cycle, about one car will be able to go to the left. If each cycle takes a minute, and you have ten cars in front of you, that means you'll have to wait ten minutes I shit you not.
Compare that to the Netherlands, where intersections get redesigned and rebuilt every time when anyone sees there are tooany accidents, and there are soany amazing traffic flow control designs there. Here in canada, traffic flow designs is "road, done"
I love Canada, I feel proudly Canadian, but Canadian road designs are removed as fuck.
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In my experience the turn lane doesnβt have a hard cutoff like that, you can usually ride the shoulder a bit to get around people if needed
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