How to Turn Left across Traffic | Driving Lessons

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We’re going to talk a little bit about turning left across traffic. What I basically want to do is just take you through a typical left turn. The first thing we want to do is move our vehicle to the left, because if we’re making a left turn, we have to have the vehicle on the left side before the turn. We’re either going to hug the middle line, or we’re going to use a left-turning lane if there is one. But we have to be far enough to the left so that we can properly execute a good, safe left turn. The next rule of thumb is that if there are cars which are coming straight, we have to remember that they have the right-of-way, so we have to wait for them before we make our left turn. Anybody coming straight has right of way over a vehicle that’s going to be turning. So the question becomes, where do we wait to let that traffic pass us before safely making our left turn? The answer to that is, we wait in the intersection. We move our car into the intersection in order to wait to let that oncoming traffic pass. What can happen is sometimes if we’re in that intersection, the light may change red. The fact that we’re in the intersection gives us the ability to execute our left turn before the cars start coming in from the side. Our light will turn red before theirs turns green. It usually gives you about three or four seconds to clear the intersection before you have to worry about that traffic moving in from the side. That’s the way to execute a good, proper, safe left turn across traffic.