Acceleration

Nope. There's plenty of large cities that have them. LA is a notorious one. Jersey does have quite a bit as well.

No my scenario does not reek of poor city planning. It's a common problem in busy parts of town usually near shopping centers and neighborhoods that get insanely busy during rush hour.

Here. I made you a diagram.

http://imgur.com/vk7iB9l

You are the orange at the bottom. You want to turn left across 3 lanes of traffic going the direction of the red arrows. The problem is, it's a busy area. The lights may sync up, they may not. Either way it's busy and there is a constant flow of traffic due to people turning right on red, people who have protected turns at the lights on either side AND the people who want to go straight through the lights on either side.

Now this road with the arrows is not jammed with cars, but there is a constant flow of cars where it is hard to cross all the lanes at once and you can't stop at the median because you will be blocking the far left lane on the yellow side. You have a line of cars behind you waiting for you, but you can't seem to get a gap in traffic. This is because most roads in america don't put jugs to block people from making left turns at busy areas like this as someone else mentioned above. Yes this turn is still legal to go left, but you could be waiting for anywhere to 3-10 minutes due to how busy it is. Trust me, I have seen this happen and I spent half my time driving for my job.

Sure you could be an asshat and sit there because you have to turn left. Or you could "inconvenience" yourself turning right onto the yellow arrow and do a u turn at the light. In most scenarios like this, it is much, much, MUCH faster to turn right than to wait and block traffic. You can argue all you want, but the truth is that if you're the guy that sits there and doesn't realize that it's faster and more efficient for the flow of traffic to keep all vehicles moving as often as possible, you're the asshat.

I never said anything about a 6 lane road without a protected turn arrow, but I live in VERY large city and there are plenty of intersections that allow right on red and cause major traffic jams due to the fact that the protected turn arrow isn't used as often as it should be at the intersections.

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