All I really want to do is make a left turn into Arby's, is that too much to ask for?
Those fat cats down at City Hall came in and they put in a beautiful planted
median right in the middle of the street. The problem is it blocks access to Arby's
from my side of the street. There's no way for me to turn left.
Of course, down at McDonald's, it's all "why don't you left on
in?" They have this really nice opening with really beautiful left turn lanes.
But Arby's doesn't get that. That's fast food inequality and Americans won't stand for it.
Well, City Hall is a block away. Why do we want?
LEFT TURNS! Where do you want it? ARBY'S! Left turns are pro-family!
Hey, hey, ho, ho. Arby's has got to go! No, not that one.
Nobody listeedn to me. So I went to get something to eat.
Stupid concrete curb. I got to drive all the way down to the next traffic signal. .
Raised medians prevent crashes. They also save lives.
But at what cost? At what cost of inconvenience? What would have taken me mere seconds. It took
me just mere minutes. One roast beef sandwich, please.
Yep. Thank you. Okay, Abu! We feast!
That hardly seems worth it. It's really a shame we have to make left turns,
because it makes safety so much more complicated. A raised median is one of the best
tools in the engineering toolbox. [Sokolow:] "Probably the most cost effective
way to reduce crashes on multi-line highways." When we raise the middle of the street,
traffic flows better and everything is safer. But sometimes we build medians
badly. They're confusing and maybe even a little bit dangerous. There's no place to
turn left. That's not a driveway. [Sokolow:] "We are sloppy. We are
not doing a great job to provide positive guidance to people in commercial areas."
[Sokolow:] "I'm a senior transportation planner, senior because I'm old.".
I prefer to say experienced. If I were building a raised median, Gary Sokolow
would be one of the first people I talk to. [Sokolow:] "I would love to see medians that
are thirty feet wide, which gives you enough space to channelize alternative movements. That is not
the canvas you've been given to paint on.". Trying to manage that space in the middle of
the road. It takes a lot of work to do it right. To do it safely and be fair about which businesses
get left turns and which ones don't. [Sokolow:] "The hard part is figuring out
what kind of median, how they're designed.". What we do with people forced to turn right.
[Sokolow:] "You can't just say that U-turnswill take care of themselves.".
And where in the median we will let people turn left.
Armed with these goals and some modest expectations.
[Sokolow:] "You're not going to please everybody, including yourself.".
Here are the dos and don'ts to make a raised median safe and effective.
[Radio:] "Now back to Vegas's best variety. Mix 94.1!"
In the video about two-way left turn lanes, I talked about how Las Vegas Boulevard is the
world's most famous raised medians. But it doesn't stop there. They extend deep into the suburbs.
There are generally two places where you can make your left turn across a median.
One is at a regular intersection. The light turns green: your turn to go,
light turns red: you wait for other people. But sometimes stop lights are far apart from one
another. And if you're on the wrong side of the street, you have to go very far out of your way
to get to businesses on the other side. So we give a second way to make
your left turn: a median opening. These are only as good as we design them.
[Sokolow:] "They should not be— in Florida we used to call them 'bullet-nosed.'"
The bullet-nosed opening is a valid engineering design. Well, valid-ish.
So you try to turn left, but you don't have a left turn lane and you don't want to get
rear ended. So you park in the median. Which blocks other people trying to make a left turn.
Bullet-nosed openings used to be all over the country. Some states are getting wise
and getting rid of them. But in the old days, they put them everywhere. It's a country road.
How much traffic could there possibly be? [Sokolow:] "As we know, they have very
fast traffic. And they have a lot of lonely areas without good lighting."
One big car coming at your back bumper at fifty-five miles an hour.
[Sokolow:] "Every median opening should have turn lanes.".
An absolute must for making left turns. A safe place for
you to go and get out of the line of fire. An important first step of many. Because there's
a lot of chaos in every median openings. Three ways to cross the street.
This one, which offers all danger and very little benefit.
Something that Craig from Ohio bumped into recently. Well, thankfully, almost.
The second bit of chaos: people making left turns off the road.
The good left turn. I'll explain why in just a minute.
It's the other kind of left turn, the bad left turn,
that we have to be worried about. [Sokolow:] "The left turn out is
a hazard to begin with.". A left turn is a left turn.
What's the big difference? It turns out turning back onto the
street has far more ways you can crash. Look at everything you have to pay attention to
traffic coming at you, from the left, from the right, people making left turns in
front of you and drivers across the street. Nearly as bad as a two way left turn lane.
And even that has one advantage: You could go halfway out and then check the
other direction before you keep going. With the median, you have to do all of
that at once. [Sokolow:]
"The driver needs to look in both directions for a very long distance looking for gaps."
"They're looking for a safe maneuver out. And sometimes that queue lines up behind you.".
Embarrassed to be holding up the line, we just go. [Sokolow:] "We accept gaps much smaller and
more comfortable with it.". "Ninety degree or 'angle'
collisions have much more of a chance to cause serious injury or death."
That's because most of these six potential crashes hit the side of your car.
[Sokolow:] "With the least amount of protection. You don't have the
engine, you don't have the trunk.". The median's engineering might be inviting
people to try a risk they normally wouldn't. [Sokolow:] "Oh, maybe only one percent of drivers
will mess up like this. But when you multiply that by the amount of traffic we're dealing
with, lots of high numbers here. People who say, 'oh, I make that, I make that movement every day,
it's not a big deal.' Maybe not to you and maybe you'll luck out the rest of your life."
The good news is engineers can use medians to make this problem go away.
They could build another median inside the median, which blocks those dangerous left turns out.
By making people turn right instead of left, we get rid of five of the six ways they could have
gotten into a crash. Now they only have to focus on oncoming traffic in one direction because
you're also blocking thru traffic as well. Which means people exiting the road,
making the 'good' left turn, only need to watch the oncoming traffic (and pedestrian).
Now, there's just one problem. This driver wanted to go left and we sent him
right. Ideally, he could just go around the block. Three rights make a left.
This method works well downtown where the blocks are tight.
But what if I'm out on the edge of the city? And I really want to make this left turn.
And I can't because those fat cats at the state capitol put in this raised median.
So I have to go right. If I rely entirely on going around the block to get straightened out, I'm
going to drive nearly three miles out of my way! [Sokolow:] "A lot of people hate U-turns. They
themselves don't hate it. They'll say, 'no, I'm fine with it. But these senior
citizens, they can't do that.'". [Sokolow:] "But they're okay with
traffic coming at them from six lanes plus traffic coming into their median open.".
Adding in U-turns does create a new place where crashes could happen.
But because there's less crash conflict, because it's more controlled, it's a lot safer.
See this white SUV over here? He's turning left into nothing. And that's okay.
That's so he can complete a U-turn and access the other side of the street.
Now, the trick is to get people's cars to turn around in the space we have. You
need a big enough street to finish the job. [Sokolow:] "On a six lane, it's not that much
of a big deal unless you're going through an area that's dealing with a lot of trucks or trailers.".
This road's really wide. It's three lanes plus sort of like a parking lane off to the side.
And so that gives, what, about 48 feet for people to complete a U-turn?
So absolutely no problem. Well, for me in my regular car. But for this guy?
Big-rig trucks already have a hard enough time trying to figure out how to turn left, trying
to make a U-turn. These trucks need a really big circle. And you know, those big rigs that have
two trailers instead of just one?. A HUGE CIRCLE!
So, if the truck driver has no way to go around the block to get turned around,
you have to build something like this— and that's just kind of ugly.
Although, two New Jersey's credit, they actually built some of these U-turns. A little weird for
somebody like me from out west has never seen one. But it looks pretty intuitive.
Also, if you do this, you get the Jiffy Lube logo. Don't change your oil on this guy's driveway.
Now, just as important as building those openings the right way?
Where we put them! Who gets a left turn opening
and who doesn't ? Because on the surface, it can seem kind of random and arbitrary.
Is it discrimination against Arby's? Well, actually, it has more to do with how far
away the driveway is from the stoplight. [Sokolow:] "When you're designing a traffic
signal, you design for some decision distance.". Room for a driver approaching a red light
to decide to slow down. [Sokolow:] "Deceleration—".
The space it takes to safely brake for the red light.
[Sokolow:] "And queue storage.". All the other drivers lined up waiting for the
red light. The busier the street, the bigger this queue storage needs to be to store all the cars.
The faster the speed limit, the bigger the other sizes are.
[Sokolow:] "A typical suburban heavy-use traffic signal is usually 500 feet or more.".
Engineers call these "intersection functional areas.".
And drivers need these spaces to safely stop. And we get ourselves
into trouble when we're trying to help out that poor business on the corner.
Poor little gas station isn't hurting anybody. Let's just cut 'em a little access right there.
Well, if we do that, somebody might decide to make a left turn going this direction instead.
Well, that kind of a left turn could lead to a new problem, the Good Samaritan Trap.
[Sokolow:] "As the traffic from the signal queues, good Samaritans let you through. And
guess what? They don't see the car coming in, the free flowing exclusive right turn. There
should definitely not be a median opening!" The safe places are a game of hopscotch
intersection. Functional areas are like a little marker you have to jump over.
We can see the median blocks Arby's, not because it's Arby's.
But because the Arby's driveway— it's inside the functional area.
But if we go down Beach Boulevard to the McDonald's, its driveway falls outside the
functional area. The developer knew this. You notice how the driveway is on the right side
of the lot instead of the left side? Now we get a gold rush for those open
spaces between the functional areas. The first business to get an opening gets the opening.
[Sokolow:] "You have a few hundred feet just for handling an unsignalized left turns.".
Which means when I make an opening for, say, business number two,
that creates a new functional area— which blocks businesses three and four.
Too bad!. But ideally, the businesses would share the opening.
They don't So you end up with this. Go pull into Carl's Jr, when you notice next
door is a Culver's, but there's no way to get into the Culver's. Just a big block wall I can't drive
through. It'd be easy if it was to my right, but it's not. You get a once in a lifetime opportunity
to make a left and into the turning lane. Halfway there, Culver's!
Had this been a raised median, I would have had to turn right, go down the street,
find a safe place to U-turn, U-turn, come back, go past the business,
make another U-turn, come back and turn right. That's where a city needs to be mean and come in
and just require businesses to have cross access. Cross access is the engineering term for
tying the two parking lots together. It's a lot safer and more efficient
than having people go out to the street. Now I've got my opportunity to turn left,
but there's a bicyclist and a pedestrian. And so now I've lost my window.
So then you just take a chance and you pull out in front of traffic anyway
because it's worth it for Culver's. But the Culver's—Carl's Jr. feud, it left
me a little bit fed up. So, I went to Freddy's. When you think about a shopping center,
cross access is sort of a feature. Single businesses might fight cross access because
'somebody might use my parking lot' or they may 'lose business to the guy next door.'
Yet we build cross access throughout these huge shopping centers all the time.
Connected parking lots are a feature, not a failure.
[Sokolow:] "When properties work together for a signal,
the trip generation from all of these properties produce a situation where a signal is warranted.".
How cool would it be for your business if you got not only an opening, you got a stoplight,
customers could exit on a green light? Well, that's not going to happen. It takes a
minimum number of cars to even consider installing a traffic signal. And none of these fast food
restaurants, on their own, come close. [Sokolow:] "Some properties decided
that they would work together. The city installed a traffic signal.".
Finally, a case to make for that shared driveway. And if all the businesses are using it,
it's going to have more traffic on it— maybe enough to even justify a traffic signal going in.
So everything we've talked about the last 15 minutes only works
if drivers actually respect the median. Get enough "Jersey drivers" treating it like this,
it might as well be painted lines. Which shouldn't be surprising.
It's on the state flag. Sometimes we purposely make the
median short so emergency vehicles can drive over them when they get stuck in traffic. Help them get
to the emergency they're trying to get to. But a short meeting for an ambulance is a
short median for everybody else. [Sokolow:] "Utah, their standard
for the height of medians is pretty high. And in Florida, medians are mountable.".
In an upcoming BONUS video, I'll show you the difference between mountable medians and ones that
are built into the roadway, as well as how medians give us cool tools for bicyclists and pedestrians.
Building a median to operate in a safe and efficient way is a lot of work,
but it's for a good purpose. [Sokolow:] "There was a very serious crash.
Two people died, two people seriously injured. "I do know that the driver was drunk, but I also
know if that drunk driver wasn't trying to make a left turn out, not only high speed,
not well lit median opening. I don't think the crash would have been a serious."
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