Talk:Pittsburgh Left

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Previously I had only heard of the "New York Left"...

[edit] Unclear

It refers to the counter-intuitive practice of giving left-turning vehicles precedence over vehicles going straight through intersections, which improves traffic flow.

Is that intended to mean that the Pittsburgh Left improves traffic flow, or that giving precedence to vehicles going straight improves traffic flow? Either way, the sentence needs to be cleaned up.

I agree that the sentence needs clarification - but it can't be as simple as an either/or thing. Imagine a fast moving 4 lane road with vehicles going 50mph. If you give priority to cars turning left then all of the oncoming traffic has to come to a screaming halt every time a car is sitting in the turn lane. That can't be good for traffic flow. On the other hand, if it's a really heavily used 2 lane road then the guy who is indicating left is blocking all of the traffic behind him. The oncoming traffic (which isn't moving fast) could just as easily pause for 2 seconds to let him cross in order to unblock a gigantic tailback of traffic in the other lane. So whether this is a good idea or not is heavily dependent on the nature of the road and the density of traffic it's carrying. I don't think such a simple sentence can do justice to that. On the other hand, everything I just wrote - whilst it seems very reasonable - is completely 'original research' and can't go into the article either unless we find some kind of authoritative source to back it up. I'm therefore going to delete that sentence. SteveBaker 20:19, 6 September 2006 (UTC)