Veering Right to Turn Left

You’re waiting at a light to turn left. There’s another car in front of you, and you’re both lined up in the left-hand turn lane.

The light changes, and they move forward… and then to the right. Huh?

This act of arcing out to turn left seems intuitive to some drivers, like a necessary component of any left turn, but this isn’t the case. Instead, you should just drive slowly enough so that you have plenty of space to make the turn safely, as opposed to swerving toward other cars for no good reason.

Race car drivers, by contrast, do have a good reason for widening their turns. That’s because the safety of the other drivers isn’t the primary concern, but instead speed. They often employ a strategy of employing late apex turns, meaning they go straight for longer before turning.

Truck drivers, too, have a good reason to swerve right before turning left: they’ve got two distinct sets of wheels to worry about. If the cab’s wheels go quickly to the left, as though you were driving a car with four wheels, your cab will start out ahead of the trailer and off to the side. The cab pulling from the side means the wheels need to turn quicker on the trailer than they did on the cab to catch up, so the turn is dramatically shortened with the trailer.

This is called off-tracking, and it’s necessary to understand if you’re a professional truck driver with an 18-wheeler rig or an RV driver with a long trailer. If you have one of these vehicles, please do learn and use these button-hook turns. If you don’t have one of these vehicles, please don’t.

Instead of solving a problem, when a smaller vehicle uses this approach, it actually creates a whole slew of problems. You’re probably going to creep into oncoming traffic, for one thing. And, since you’re turning left, there is a real chance you might scrape by one of the cars off to your right that are going straight.

Go for a drive through any town—legally and cautiously, mind you—and you’ll almost certainly observe erratic behavior from other drivers. People have all sorts of misconceptions about how to deal with things like a four-way stop sign, and signaling seems to have become optional. Distracted driving is now normal driving.

This particular example of bad driving strikes me as someone trying to be too smart for their own good. They’ve seen 18-wheelers and race car drivers swerving right in order to turn left, so naturally they want to copy the professional drivers. Copying the pros without understanding is the definition of cargo cult thinking, something I wrote about here: