Turning left in Los Angeles is scary - and it's not about to change

The light turns green, and you inch forward past the crosswalk into the intersection, your left blinker ticking like a clock. If you don't start moving forward fast enough, whoever is driving the car behind you will honk their horn. But then you wait. It's a guessing game, because you can't see around the cars opposite you who are also trying to turn left. Your knuckles start turning white on the steering wheel and as the light turns yellow you hope the drivers going straight don't try to run the light and you can sneak through between the light changes.

This is a common left turn scene in the city of Los Angeles, and for many it's not just annoying, but also dangerous.

"In my experience driving almost every single left turn I have to make is at a non-advanced green," said Becca Peer, a medical student at the University of Southern California who said she almost got into an accident on her motorcycle as a result of a driver making an unprotected left turn at a light.

"He didn't see me and barely missed me, which was pretty scary," she said.

Over half of the accidents at intersections in the city of Los Angeles are T-bone wrecks, or what the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center calls "broadside" collisions, when a vehicle crashes into the side of a car and receives the brunt of the impact, according to data from SafeTREC.

Broadside accidents are the most common type of accident associated with the lack of left turn signals, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation and experts say left turn arrows can minimize wrecks at intersections. But with experts estimating that just 12 percent of intersection approaches have some kind of left turn arrow, it begs the question: why aren't there more?

The short answer: It costs a lot of money

Installing left turn arrows can cost upwards of $50,000, according to John Fisher, a professional traffic operations engineer and former LADOT employee.

"Adding left turn arrows to an existing signalized intersection is expensive and more than just adding a left turn signal head," he said.

Not only do workers have to install the actual signal, but they also have to change the pole that the signal attaches to, called the mast arm, to a longer one measuring between 30 to 45 feet. Because the new mast arm is heavier, its foundation must also be deeper, so workers also have to dig further into the ground to install the new pole.

And there is more than just one kind of left turn arrow. The traditional kind that is build into the flow of the intersection at all times, and another kind called "phasing" left turns, that only occur when there are a certain number of cars are in the left turn lane. If not, then cars must make an unprotected left, yielding to oncoming traffic going straight.

Fisher called phasing signals "the best of both worlds," saying that left turn arrows disrupt the flow of traffic, so it's nice to not have them when traffic flow isn't very high.

But according to collision data at intersections with an average of more than two per year, the average rate of wrecks per intersection with phasing left turns is actually higher then the rate for intersections with at least one direction without any left turn arrow. Both rates are higher than those of intersections that have traditional dedicated left turn arrows.

The rates aren't different enough to warrant a change, they're less then one collision per intersection apart.

But mapping it out tells a different story.

Regardless of how the data is interpreted, LADOT doesn't seem to have any recent left turn signal plan. In fact, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation has no digitized or paper record of all the protected left turn signals in the city, according to Daylon Powell from the risk management and records division of the DOT.

In 2009 Fisher wrote the only comprehensive history of left turn arrows in LA, but since he retired in 2012, no one else has done it. But the 2009 report does provide some more context.

The history of left turns in Los Angeles

"The limited number of left turn arrows in the city is a consequence of both the period in which Los Angeles became a mature city and its signal operating philosophy," wrote Fisher in the report.

In 1956, there was a city wide effort to modernize the city, repainting lines on the road to include "left-turn pockets," but it wasn't until the 1970s that left-turn arrows was introduced. Mast arms were finally large enough to hold as many lights as needed to use left-turn phasing, and while the efforts began in the suburbs, it did not begin in the City of LA just yet.

Fisher notes a turning point in 1991, when the city introduced occasional left-turn phasing, where a protected green arrow would only be activated if the line of cars waiting to turn exceeded four cars.

Fisher said in an interview that left-turn phasing is the "best of both worlds", saying that if traffic flow is low, a motorist should be able to turn on a solid green light, then in busier traffic, a motorist has the luxury of a dedicated left turn arrow.

Traffic patterns may be different in the future due to traffics apps

When Fisher was at LADOT, he said it was their goal to "have some form of left turn phasing at every intersection of two boulevards, such as at Figueroa Street and Jefferson Boulevard, plus other locations where sight distance was limited or where there was a left turn collision pattern."

And while it's true that many major intersections have either traditional left turn arrows, or phased arrows, some, like Van Nuys Boulevard and Oxnard Street don't have them in all directions, perhaps that's why that intersection had the highest number of T-bone crashes between 2015 and 2017.

Also, a study out of UC Berkeley found that traffic apps such as Waze and Google Maps are changing normal traffic patterns and guiding drivers to streets that weren't designed for the amount of traffic they are now getting.

So that means intersections that normally wouldn't have the traffic to warrant a dedicated left arrow may now have more.

According to Fisher's report, change, when it comes to left turn arrows, comes a lot from public pressure. In the past, left turn arrows were only installed by the city if there was enough public pressure for one - the more vocal residents were, the more likely the city was to put in a left-turn arrow. Today, perhaps Angelenos can use the same tactic.