This is a post about what “Yield” means, as in, what you must do to obey a yield sign at an intersection.
Here in NoVA, “Yield” is most commonly interpreted as “I got my front bumper into the intersection first, so I win, f*** you.”
OK, the “f*** you” is gratuitous, because in NoVA traffic, that goes without saying. If we were honest, we’d replace the silly Lion Rampant on the county flag with something a bit more relevant to our most common civic experience: Traffic.
My serious point is that, based on my recent observations, many drivers in this area literally don’t know what “Yield” means, when it comes to traffic circles.
Near as I can tell, a good solid 5% of drivers in this area treat the “Yield” sign at a traffic circle the same way they treat a yellow light at an intersection. They speed up. In this case, they speed up if they think they can beat the oncoming traffic, instead of beating the red light. Figuring, I guess, that if they can get into the intersection first, then avoiding an accident is the other guy’s problem.
As a consequence, if you are in the circle, you have to be prepared to hit the brakes to accommodate traffic entering the circle. Because you can never tell when the oncoming driver is going to treat a yield-controlled intersection as a race to see who can get through first.
Let me ‘splain it. If you have the yield sign, and you force an oncoming car to slow down to avoid an accident, you’ve broken the law. In other words, if two cars would collide in an intersection if they maintained course and speed, the vehicle facing the Yield sign has to allow the other vehicle to proceed unimpeded.
More formally (emphasis mine):
Where a "Yield Right-of-Way" sign is posted, the driver of a vehicle approaching or entering such intersection shall slow down to a speed reasonable for the existing conditions, yield the right-of-way to the driver of another vehicle approaching or entering such intersection from another direction, and, if required for safety, shall stop at a clearly marked stop or yield line, or, in the absence of a stop or yield line, stop before entering the crosswalk on the near side of the intersecting roadway where the driver has a view of approaching traffic on the intersecting roadway, and shall yield the right-of-way to the driver of any vehicle approaching on such other highway from either direction.
...
At circular intersections, vehicles already in the circle shall have the right-of-way over vehicles approaching and entering the circle, unless otherwise directed by traffic control devices.
Source: Code of Virginia.
Yielding at a traffic circle is explicitly NOT a question of who enters the intersection first. And that seems to be what some non-negligible fraction of drivers around here fail to grasp.
Now let me go on to my recent near-death experiences here in NoVA.
Background
A few years ago my town put in a mini-roundabout in a busy T-intersection. This replaced a troublesome one-way stop sign that had been the site of traffic backups and accidents for as long as I have lived here. Below are two Google Street View scenes, where I’ve pointed to a manhole cover and tree to orient the two pictures.
Originally (2015), it was a T-intersection. Cars at the left had a stop sign, cars moving from bottom to top (or top to bottom) of the picture had right-of-way. After the change (2016), it’s a mini-roundabout. Cars in the circle have right-of-way, and cars coming from all directions have to yield to cars in the circle.
It was a vast improvement. But …
But it relies on drivers entering the circle to yield to traffic already in the circle. That is, it requires that drivers a) know the law, b) pay attention to traffic signs, and c) slow down when approaching an intersection and yield to traffic in the circle.
That’s your basic three-strikes-and-you’re out scenario here in Northern Virginia.
After nearly getting t-boned twice in one day, by through traffic that simply blew through the yield sign at speed and drove straight across the low center circle, I complained to the Town’s Department of Public Works. I must not have been the only one, because the yield sign eventually morphed into a lighted, flashing yield sign. That’s a solar panel on top of the new lighted yield sign, in the 2019 view.
And now, with that flashing Yield sign right in your face? Fewer drivers blow through it at 30 MPH. But you still have the occasional driver who treats the yield like a yellow light. As long as they can get their bumper into the circle ahead of you, they don’t seem to perceive the need to slow down, let alone yield. In fact, they’ll speed up to ensure that they get into the circle first.
As a result, what ought to be a standard and unambiguous right-of-way rule — traffic must yield to vehicles in the circle — devolves into a complex game of “chicken”. If you’re in the circle, will the oncoming driver stop? If you slow down, are you just inviting that driver to cut into the circle ahead of you. And, God forbid, if you slow down to avoid hitting a driver who ignores the yield, expect the standard driver-education maneuver (horn and finger) from the car tailgating you. (It’s NoVA, so there’s always a car tailgating you.) Because, in hitting your brakes to avoid an accident, you delayed the super-important person behind you by half a second. So, obviously, you deserve the abuse.
This intersection still functions much better than it did before. But it doesn’t work the way it says in the textbooks. At least not around here.
Double dog-bone of death.
Source: Transform66.org, annotations in red are mine.
What brings on this rant is the near-accident I near-witnessed yesterday, on the new double-dog-bone intersection that has replaced a standard cloverleaf at the edge of Vienna. Because they’ve run out of space for new lanes under the overpass — or maybe because they just like keeping the locals confused — this interchange replaces the standard cloverleaf design with two traffic circles and four yield signs, along with half-clover-leafs in each direction, to get traffic on and off the interstate.
And, as with our little mini-roundabout in Town, this works great on paper. But maybe not so much in real life.
On paper, the sharp curves of the traffic circles force traffic to slow. Then, everybody knows to yield to traffic already in the circle. That includes both through traffic on the surface street (top-to-bottom, above), and traffic coming off the interstate. Everybody gets through the intersection safely, and there are no new stop lights.
In practice, heavy trucks come up the off-ramps really don’t want to come to a complete stop. They are moving sharply uphill, and getting re-started is a problem. So if there’s a break in traffic, you will see trucks come barreling through the yield signs at the tops of the exit ramps.
And, as is true in the Town of Vienna, maybe one driver in twenty doesn’t really grasp what it means to yield to traffic in the circle. Which was the cause of the near-collision I witnessed yesterday, as a passenger car traveling top-to-bottom on the diagram above blithely went into the circle, just as a construction truck was about to occupy that space. If not for the caution and fast reflexes of the truck driver, that would have been one nasty side-impact collision.
Conclusion: Failure-to-avoid rules all.
The bottom line is that you have to fight your war with the army you’ve got. In this case, you can reliably count on one-in-twenty simply treating these yield signs, at best, as they would a yellow light. Assuming they notice them at all.
So the real operative right-of-way rule is “failure to avoid”. If you can avoid a collision, you are burdened to do so.
These circles really and truly don’t work as they do in the textbooks. Your sole option is to ride the brake as you go around them. And hope for the best.
