Why You Want To Avoid Left Hand Turns

With gas prices soaring, here’s a surprising, absolutely free way to economize.

SAVE MONEY & TIME | Is the high and climbing price of gasoline weighing on your mind? On Saturday, the Vancouver Sun reported that over the past week the price of gas across Metro Vancouver jumped to $1.40 a litre and that locals should brace for increases as high as $1.60 a litre heading into summer (CLICK HERE for the story). Last spring The New York Times ran a practical piece on ways to save on gas with reporter Michelle Higgins recommending, among other things, that drivers download an app like GasBuddy.com to help them find cheap gas while on the road (locally try online at VancouverGasPrices.com); that they fill up with regular instead of premium; and that they check to make sure their tire pressure is right (CLICK HERE for the story).

Fabulous as Higgins’s 13 suggestions are, she neglected to mention a proven way to economize on fuel, save on time spent in traffic and reduce injuries to drivers and passengers: Avoid turning left.

Do The Right Thing

“Driving a route taking only right turns instead of left turns is more fuel efficient than driving normally because the car uses up more gas idling while waiting for traffic to clear on a left turn than taking three right turns.” That’s the verdict from the “Mythbusters” guys who devoted part of an episode on their popular television show to examining the now-famous no-left-turn rule that all United Parcel Service drivers have followed since 2007 (CLICK HERE for a link to the episode). UPS has plenty of data to back up their claim that making left-hand turns wastes both time and fuel.

Right Is Might

Left-hand turns are also recipe for disaster. “When it comes to city accidents, there are definitely a lot more collisions with people turning left than right,” said the ICBC Dial-A-Claim adjuster I spoke with yesterday. The adjuster, who did not want her name mentioned, says what typically happens is that someone will attempt a last-minute left on a yellow light and fail to notice an oncoming car trying to squeeze through on the same yellow. The driver turning left is always at fault, and when you couple that with the fact that left-turn crashes produce the second highest number of occupant injuries after head-on collisions, “If you can manage it, turning right is usually the safer thing to do,” she said. —Ruth Rainey

Photos: iStock, shutterstock