- Almost half of all traffic crashes occur at intersections.
As a smart driver, it's critical
that you locate intersections and find other vehicles
and road users to keep yourself safe.
Today, we're going to give you tips
and strategies to stay safe at intersections.
Stick around, we'll be right back with that information.
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Intersections sections are everywhere
in your driving environment,
and they come in many different shapes and sizes.
Some of them are conventional intersections,
such as this one right here in a residential area.
Others, not so much.
If you come across a crosswalk,
bicycle lane, those types of things,
you're intersecting with potentially other road users.
And it's an intersection,
but it's not what we think of in our head
as a conventional intersection.
Roundabouts are another form of intersections.
And there's different rules for roundabouts,
especially for those of us in North America,
that these are reappearing on the driving landscape.
They are something new for drivers to learn about
and deal with as part of their driving experience.
For those of you in Europe and North America and Asia
and other places in the world,
they're laughing at drivers here in North America
because you love your roundabouts.
I learned about roundabouts when I lived in Australia.
So when you're proceeding through roundabouts,
through intersections, you have to scan in advance.
And this person wants to go.
So I'm going to let them go
because I don't want to turn in beside them.
Complex intersections are easy to locate
because they're marked with traffic lights,
and we can see the traffic lights.
We scan the intersection before proceeding through.
The way is clear.
The light is green.
There's no road users that are going
to cross our path of travel.
Here, crosswalk which is completely at the intersection.
But you need to be looking for road users.
That is an obscure intersection
because it's winter time,
the road markings are almost scraped off the road.
And there's just a little sign, a regulatory sign,
over on the right,
telling you that there's a crosswalk there.
But that is an intersection.
There's another intersection here.
Easy because it's a complex intersection marked
by traffic lights.
Now, there are other intersections along here
that are intersecting with the major road.
They're controlled by a stop sign.
This one, for example, there's no vehicles, no road users.
There's a school on the left.
We have another intersection with a marked crosswalk here
which is highly visible because the flashing lights.
Another intersection over here.
And if you can train yourself to take note
of these intersections, as you're driving
in a straight line and looking farther down the road,
this is going to keep you safer.
Controlled intersection.
Vehicle turning.
No other road users.
Pedestrian waiting back from the intersection.
And this is what you need to do.
Intersection over here, crosswalk on the right here.
Again, the lines are faint.
It's difficult to see them, but that is an intersection.
We have all of these businesses along here
where they could, we potentially intersect
with vehicles going in and out of the business,
or the service or whatnot.
Here, another crosswalk.
So you are dealing with intersections as part
and parcel of your driving.
And to keep yourself safe
and not to be part of that statistic
where more than 40% of crashes occur at intersections,
you need to locate intersections.
In the city, it's a little easier
to locate the intersections
because we know there's an intersection
approximately every city block.
There's controls, yield signs, stop signs,
traffic lights, complex intersections,
those types of things.
Road markings between us and bicycle lanes
where we could potentially intersect with a bicycle.
So if we're coming up to the corner,
we're going to make a right-hand turn,
we could intersect with the bicycle.
And as any of the smart drivers
who've been watching my videos,
I always say, stay back so you can see the tires
of the vehicle in front of you making clear contact
with the pavement.
That is critical space management skill.
This vehicle in front of me, this logging truck,
or the stick hauler,
is it's euphemistically known in the industry
has timber hanging off the back of the truck.
It's overhanging the back of the vehicle.
So because it's overhanging the back of the vehicle,
which I can know because I can see it,
and I can also see the flag that is a requirement
for them to have on the back of the vehicle
if the load is hanging over,
then I stay back even farther so that I don't have one
of those come through the windshield.
'Cause that would tend to mess up your makeup.
Scanning the intersection, staying back from the truck.
The truck is accelerating slowly
because it's heavy and loaded.
And so I'm not really getting excited.
I'm not going around the vehicle.
I'm not in a big hurry.
Scanning the intersections, entrances to the malls,
intersection here, intersections into the services.
There's nobody there.
MIT, locating intersections, mapping intersections,
and tracking road users at the intersections,
other vehicles, red light runners,
pedestrians crossing against the light.
Depending on what time of the day it is,
if it's 10 o'clock at night and you're in a city area
that has lots of bars and those types of things around,
you may encounter drunk drivers
or drunk pedestrians who are going to cross
against the light and those types of things.
Scanning, no pedestrians.
I got a vehicle in the turn lane here.
The vehicle has come to a stop
and we're proceeding out onto the roadway.
We can see that we have a merge here.
Because we have a merge, we're shoulder-checking
to the left to make sure nobody's trying
to sneak past us there.
We signal over.
And we're staying to the top side of the curve.
Even in a passenger vehicle, stay up here.
That way, you're going to have a better line of sight.
I can also see up here, the vehicles out on the highway.
Signal on as the truck driver has in front of me.
There's a vehicle beside me.
He's moving over into the other lane.
I can see the signal.
Very nice of them.
If you can do that, that helps.
There's a scale, a DOT scale here.
So this is why the truck drivers are moving over
into the left-hand lane
because the DOT scale is in the middle.
There's a slip lane here and deceleration lane.
So there's another intersection right here.
I'm scanning the intersection.
There's nobody in the intersection.
There's a vehicle turning.
The vehicle is stopped.
To keep yourself safe and to be a defensive driver,
you need to locate the intersections
and you need to scan them.
We've got somebody on the side of the road.
So defensive movements, we're moving over to the left
to get around these vehicles
because you don't know what they're doing.
Shoulder-checking back.
And if you do that on your driver's test,
you have somebody on the side of the road,
you can't just kind of move half over into the other lane.
Don't do that.
You have to change lanes completely into the other lane,
and then completely back into the lane of travel.
You see the logging trucks went into the DOT scale.
That's why they got off at the left.
So now we have another intersection
on the other side of the DOT scale
where the trucks are coming back onto the highway here.
So we know that.
So we're going to stay on the inside lane
because there's vehicles,
trucks potentially could be merging back on the inside here.
We have a truck coming down here at the intersection.
I can tell there's an intersection.
I didn't even know there was one here,
but I did see the truck moving out here.
The truck is coming to a stop.
We're good to go.
We have a sign here.
We have another intersection right here.
We can kind of see the yield sign for the intersection,
but it's still difficult to locate.
And some of these intersections
are going to be more difficult to locate on roadways
and highways and those types of things
because they're farther apart.
And in some areas, depending where you live,
they're going to be kind of scattered out.
They're not going to be at regular intervals.
So you're going to have to look farther
down the road and try and figure out
where these are and those types of things.
This one here will tell you
there's an exit off to a different highway
that you can intersect with.
All of these tourist information signs as well
will give you clues that there are businesses
that you potentially could intersect
with vehicles coming in and out of the businesses.
On these back two lanes, skinny roads,
you're going to have lots of personal residences,
people's houses and whatnot.
And there's going to be driveways.
Sometimes you'll have signs such as that,
"Driveway 100 meters",
but there's driveways all the way along this roadway.
Roadway here.
And we're simply scanning farther down the road.
And we're watching to see if any vehicles
are approaching our roadway
as we're coming out here.
We can barely see the stop sign up there in the distance.
And we know there's another intersection there.
There's this intersection here on the right.
Sometimes you can see the street signs
which will indicate what street it is,
whether it's Elm Street or Spruce Street or whatnot
which will also give you a clue that there's a road there.
Traffic signs as well will help you to locate intersections.
And then we have intersection signs,
cautionary signs which specifically tell you
that there are intersections that you are approaching here.
And this one tells you that there's this T-intersection here
off to the right.
Intersection, off to the left.
Some traffic signs here.
We can see that we have a crosswalk here.
We have a cautionary sign on the right
which indicates that there potentially
could be pedestrians crossing the roadway
and will intersect with your path of travel.
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Have a great day. Bye now.