citizens against the Pittsburgh Left!
no no no, this isn't some ideological diatribe. today, friends, i'm here to inveigh, to bemoan, to decry a befuddling and horrible maneuver amongst pittsburgh drivers...
you see, carson got a car recently, and he's very kind to me and lets me borrow it, so i've become more attuned to the ways of the road. i've known about the pittsburgh left for quite some time, but i've never directly experienced until lately. and you know what? it really pisses me off.
what is this pittsburgh left, you ask? here's what wikipedia has to say about it:
The "Pittsburgh Left" involves two cars waiting at a traffic light or other stop signal: one turning left and one going straight. The left-turning car will execute its turn through the intersection before the car going straight passes through the intersection, where normally it would yield. Permission to do so is either given (by the car going straight), or taken (by the left-turning car cutting in front of the other car).weird. and stupid. and ILLEGAL!!! pennsylvania law (like the law everywhere) says that drivers turning left must yield to drivers going straight! so why is it that some pittsburgh drivers think that they don't need to heed this law? i dunno, but i don't like it. not one bit.
this morning, somebody pittsburgh lefted me. so i did what any wronged driver would do -- i honked the horn and yelled a bad word at him. if the pittsburgh left causes an accident, i'm pretty damn sure that the left-or is at fault. but this local custom puts a weird responsibility on the left-ee to make sure nobody's gonna smash into him/her off at an intersection. wtf?!?!
sadly, i doubt that anything i do can overcome the commonality of the pittsburgh left. nevertheless, i will not participate in it, nor will i stop honking and yelling at drivers who initiate it at stoplights. play by the rules, people!!! vehicle accidents are not cool!
erm, but i guess i should mention that i have one caveat about this -- i have, do, and will let bicyclists turn left in front of me at a stoplight, provided that they signal that they're making a left turn. why? because i like bicyclists, i like when bicyclists use the turn signals, and compared to big ol' gas-guzzling cars, bikes are little. i'm okay with this inconsistency. you should be, too.
posted by emily @ Wednesday, March 28, 2007
3 comments
3 Comments:
tiny dancer loves crap.
if, from a dead stop, you lunge forward to hit a car that's making a left across your lane -- that is to say, broadside a car you could see and avoid -- i have very little doubt that it's you at fault.
i'm no fan of the pittsburgh left, and as a cyclist i'm no fan of the inane, rampant, and highly arbitrary generosity of pittsburgh drivers which tends to result in drivers inadvertantly giving away my right of way with terrifying frequency, but after 9 years of driving in pittsburgh, here's how i deal with it:
i use it as soon as it's obvious that the other car expects me to (whether i like it or not, i'll impede traffic less just by going along), and i do everything within reason not to give it (and to be clear, though i'll use it, it's only going along to get along; i don't expect it and don't resent when it's denied me). for the same reason -- keeping things moving as fast as possible -- if you aggressively assert it by going across on or just before the light, that's fine. it costs me nothing, it's decisive (always a pleasant surprise among pittsburgh drivers), and i don't need the angst of resenting such a minor intrusion, if that's even what it is. but i will proceed forward on the light; i will not go out of my way to invite someone to go, because -- are you catching the theme here? -- doing so simply slows everything down.
what gets me fired up, though, is this region's utter inability to utilize every inch of the pavement preceding a bottleneck and, in a civil, orderly fashion, execute a flowing steady alternative merge at said bottleneck. not only won't drivers around here fill up all available pavement, preferring to line up as much as a half-mile before the merge, but they will straddle the line in an effort to make sure that no one else uses that pavement either. given the many bottlenecks and the high volume of traffic in new jersey, if jersey drivers were the same as pittsburgh drivers, i'd still be sitting in that nightmarish traffic jam from 1998. still.
in general, pittsburgh drivers have to grow some balls. it would make driving less rather than more angry. i see more road rage, more inane irrational driving behavior, here than i ever did in jersey (although i have no doubt that true pittsburgh drivers in new jersey see plenty of rage from jersey drivers, but then that's their own damned fault).
I'm with Krista on this one.
Without it, no one would ever be able to get anywhere that involved a left turn.
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