Monday 1 March 2010

Reading Road Markings...




You're driving from Left to Right approaching this junction, and have been asked to turn right at the end of the road. It's your driving test and you're nervous. If you're a driver, you can appreciate that this is not a straightforward junction. You're actually dealing with a T junction that joins a one way street, and then immediately dealing with turning right at the end of that one way street. The situation is made slightly more complex by the junction on the left abutting the first bit of the junction.



Ultimately, you're trying to go from the first yellow arrow to the second, and there are several ways of getting this wrong, as well as the usual ways of doing a junction wrongly.

First of all, you're initially going down a two-way road, but ahead of you, you can see a one way street. So it's easy to assume that you're already on a one way street. Moving onto the wrong side of the road before you get to the first part of the junction is the commonest way of failing here. And the examiners do have to fail you for it. You're driving down the wrong side of the road on approach to quite a blind corner. If someone turned left into the street from the one way bit, you could have a head on collision. The clue is the dotted lines at the end of the road. There's a double row on the left hand side of the road, but only a single row on the right hand side.

The second way of bollocking this up is to treat the whole thing as two-way. You get the first bit right, but then you incorrectly keep to the left lane as you turn right at the end. This is less dangerous, but the examiners will still mark it as a serious driving fault. You can tell it's the end of a one way street because the double row of dotted lines extend across the full width of the junction, and there are two give way triangles, one in each lane.

Thirdly and finally, you can attempt to turn right at the end of the first bit instead of the second, heading the wrong way into a one way street. There are some nice red no entry signs to help you avoid doing this, but should you miss them, you've got a good chance of smashing head on into a bus. The examiner would probably mark this as a reason to fail you.

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