(05-27-2019, 07:31 PM)Bob_McBob Wrote: You can no longer turn right on red from Caroline to Erb heading west (away from uptown). It's apparently causing some significant traffic backups.
I waited to respond until morning, after I had a chance to see for myself, because even my jaded self had trouble believing our traffic engineers would do something so stupid.
Sure enough, there is indeed a “no right turn on red” sign on southbound Caroline at Erb.
When I got there, southbound traffic was dutifully waiting at the red. An LRV arrived, and I snuck across with my bike on the all-red before the gates started to come down. The LRV went through, and then the lights went to green … for Erb. Traffic continued to wait. Finally Caroline got a green, by which time traffic was backed up around the curve, probably all the way to Bridgeport (the LRV happened to be on the southbound track, so Caroline straight-through traffic should have got a green, but that’s another story). Note that this was at about 09:30 this morning, hardly the maximum traffic portion of the day.
When the light is red, the only traffic which conflicts with the right turn is pedestrians crossing to and from the island. If it works for car traffic to yield to pedestrians on the green, then they’re capable of yielding to pedestrians on the red. So no matter ones position on right-turn-on-red, it should definitely be allowed here. Also, side note, it’s not clear to me that regular intersection traffic lights control separated right turn lanes. If the light controls it, what is the yield sign for? Without the island it would go without saying that turning traffic must yield to pedestrians. So really the no-right-turn sign should be considered moot, as there is no traffic light controlling the right turn lane.
This right turn lane is already a 1-lane bottleneck in what is mostly a 2- or 3-lane route across town; to subject it to an utterly pointless interruption every time the light turns red is just insane.
I wonder what they think they’re doing? My already low opinion of our traffic engineers has gone down still further.