Exactly how many cars should be risking life and limb to make a left after the light turns yellow (or red)? (Photo by Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
YELLOW LIGHT PROTOCOLS are a contentious subject in these parts. Every Angeleno seems to abide by their own personal law. At coffee the other day, my pal Adam said, “It’s just one of those L.A. rules, like how three cars can go left on the yellow.” I balked. “It should be two cars max!”
We’re not talking about a protected left with a dedicated arrow. This is the specific L.A. phenomenon of left-turners inching into the intersection while the light is green and then trying to ram through once it turns yellow, typically resulting in at least one or two cars going left on the red.
Professor Eric Shen of USC Viterbi School of Engineering calls those cars (adorably) “the sneakers.” And the goal of traffic engineering, he said, is to account for their behavior, as well as other naughty but common driving tics.
In L.A., according to Shen, people tend not to be “defensive drivers.” But, he adds, “when we are aggressive, we assume everyone else will be cautious.”
In other words — I, special flower that I am, can gun it through the red and no one will hit me.
As Shen explains, traffic engineers study the accidents at particular intersections and cater the lights to driver behavior in that location. That might mean extending the typical yellow interval of 3.5 seconds for another half second, or keeping both sets of lights red for a beat to prevent broadside collisions.
There’s not really a prescribed should in terms of how many cars go left — except for the obvious, which is, ideally, don’t run the red. But traffic engineering strategy is generally more concerned with taking into account what people actually do.
After all, yelling at the clouds “only two cars per yellow!” isn’t gonna save lives. But if you’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing the Beverly and Crescent Heights Blvd intersection, the yelling might be involuntary.
So that leaves the rest of us to opine wildly on exactly how many cars should be risking life and limb to make a left after the light turns yellow (or red).
Turns out, this exact scenario is what inspired showrunner (and L.A. driver of 20+ years) Mike Schur to first think about who goes to heaven and who goes to hell almost a decade ago.
“Mulling over this sort of little societal agreement,” he says, “is one of the things that percolated and led to The Good Place,” his NBC sitcom centered on ethics and the afterlife.
And boy, has Schur done some good mulling on this particular left turn on yellow question: “The standard is two. No one can get upset at two. I think in most cases, three is acceptable, if a slight irritation, because of the one or two second delay in the green light and the 25 to 35 foot distance from the oncoming cars going straight. Anything beyond three, and you are a dangerous lunatic who should be tried in a military prison and convicted and sent to jail forever.”
In the Good Place televisual universe, fourth car left turners are going straight to hell.
A social media survey (my fancy way of saying I polled Angelenos on Instagram) largely echoed Schur’s analysis with this breakdown: one car (7%); two cars (47%); three cars (38%); and four cars (8%).
No one was less than fully confident in their convictions. “Depends if one car is in the box already. If yes, then three, if no, then two,” wrote Christina Friel, a comedy writer who’s lived here for five years.
“Three. It is written in stone. It’s only two when the person in front doesn’t know the rules and turns too late,” said photographer Andy Reaser. Ariana Lenarsky, singer of L.A. indie music duo Bandwave, offered: “For me it’s three because I drive like a diva bitch.”
Suspiciously, no one from the 8% of respondents who chose four cars offered up rationale for their vote. Perhaps they know, deep down, of the error of their ways.
“You can feel in your gut that you're doing something wrong when you're the fourth car, you just know it,” Schur says. “The temperature of the air changes around you, a little bead of sweat forms on your brow as you start to accelerate. And I just want people to pay attention to that feeling of I know I'm not supposed to do this, but I'm doing it anyway.”
There is, of course, an actual law that is supposed to govern this.
California Vehicle Code 21453 states that any vehicle that’s over the intersection line when the light turns red is allowed to go. A rule that, considering the average car length is 14.7 feet, seems to lend the most credence, at least legally, to two cars per yellow – and to some variance to account for the scale of the intersection.
The police officer I accosted as he was picking up his afternoon Starbucks agreed, telling me he’d generally say two cars, maybe three depending on the length of the light. Has he ever ticketed a third car for going? He nods. “But it was egregious,” he adds. On the whole, his partner explained, they’re more concerned with cars blocking an intersection than a stray car or two making a hasty left on the red.
Which leaves us at an impasse — the worst traffic scenario of all. If you’re probably not going to get a ticket for it, and almost everyone here has a different opinion, is a correct answer even possible? Maybe the closest we can get is to determine what is rather than what should be.
For this I turned to Henning Fog, a writer who drove for Lyft all last year, logging 12,000 miles. “From what I’ve seen, the average is three,” he said. “I would feel comfortable pushing it to four in extenuating circumstances. Five is a non-starter. ”
But Fog has a more encompassing philosophy when it comes to being a driver in Los Angeles: Don’t get stuck on what’s right per se, but rather on what’s sanity-promoting.
“Everyone on the road here is stupid and they are going to do stupid things.” he told me. “But I realized at a certain point, if I don't accept the way things are, then I am actually going to go insane.”
Lauren Bans is a writer in Los Angeles.
