I was in Miami after Hurricane Andrew. The traffic lights didn’t return for weeks. It was rather amazing.
For less busy intersections, people just treated them as 4 way stops.
For busier intersections, say a 3 lane road with a 2 lane road crossing it, there was sometimes a police officer to direct traffic. But sometimes not, and that’s when it got interesting. What would often happen is that the different traffic directions would try to take turns. One direction would get momentum going until someone brave enough in the other direction would poke their car out. Eventually the one direction would stop and the other direction would start going.
But sometimes even that could not work. And this is when the volunteer traffic director would appear. Someone driving with a passenger would have their passenger get out and start directing traffic till their car got through and maybe for a couple more minutes. Then that person would go get back in their car and suddenly another volunteer would hop out of another car. Serial volunteer traffic directing is one of my enduring memories of Miami from that time.
In Florida (and every other state that I'm aware of), a dead traffic light is, by law, to be treated as an all-way stop sign, so you're supposed to take turns. Traffic lights are so incredibly reliable that many people seem unaware of this fact, though, based on what I've observed. Perhaps the behavior you describe is due to people intentionally disobeying the rules?
Things get really interesting when there are intersections of multilane highways. For example, an intersection of two 6-lane (3 each way) highways.
With 12 lanes of cars constantly approaching the intersection, that's a lot to keep track of to figure out who goes first.
I saw this recently with Irma in FL. Mostly each set of lanes would start moving roughly together once one person got brave enough to enter the intersection. But it's very hard to adjust to.
I even found myself sometimes just going after stopping without fully checking to see if I had the right-of-way or not.
There used to be a 4-way stop with 11 lanes that I would frequently drive through. It wasn't the prettiest but it worked better than I would've thought.
In Iraklio, Greece, this is how you drive. We even have a name for it: "Taliban driving". You assume you always have the right-of-way and you go. If you don't, you will never get anywhere. Anyone says otherwise, you tell him to go woohoo himself.
And then people from Crete wonder why so many people die in the road every year!
Reminds me of a joke: a guy is riding in a car with his friend when the friend zooms through a red light. The passenger exclaims: “what are you doing, you’re going to get us killed!” The driver says: “don’t worry, I learned to drive from my brother and he drives through red lights all the time.” They approach another red light and again the driver zooms through and the same conversation ensues. A few minutes later they come to a green light and the driver screeches to a halt. “Why are you stopping!? The light is green” says the passenger. The driver replies, “Yeah, my brother might be coming the other way!”
(I thought this was an early George Carlin joke but I can’t say for sure.)
Traffic lights are often installed in intersections where there are too many cars for an all way stop. When there are a lot of cars approaching an intersection, a traffic light can increase throughput.
Law has more to do with liability than practicality. Imagine trying to settle a dispute or lawsuit involving a volunteer traffic director, for instance.
People can be incredibly cordial when there aren't any problems or one big common one they can focus their efforts around. It isn't until personal liability enters the equation
that the finger-pointing gets going.
So two ways Stop, two ways Yield? This sounds like an accident waiting to happen and/or an invitation to gratuitous ticket-writing.
Reason being, given that this construction is expressly prohibited in many (most?) jurisdictions, there's clearly no right-of-way rule for such a combined intersection that's universally understood or taught, and I can think of several "reasonable" candidate rules that drivers would invent on-the-fly upon first approaching such an intersection.
As an aside, I'd personally assume that such a "all-way combo" intersection would essentially devolve into an all-way Stop in any case where traffic is either approaching or stopped at two or more cross directions, if only because this seems to be the rule least likely to fail catastrophically against both itself and a variety of other rules.
Does anyone know of any jurisdiction that permits this sort of intersection, and, if so, what the right-of-way rules are there?
This is interesting, in Europe traffic lights are always associated with traffic signs (at least in countries I drove) and one traffic lights are off for some reason, you should obey traffic signs. If the light is on, you ignore the signs.
This way in case of issues with traffic lights or when the city is jammed and they turn off the lights, everyone knows what to do.
lights going out isn't that rare, at least where i'm living, and people know how to handle it. it's just if you have enough lanes of traffic, it's too much coordination to treat it properly like an all-way stop.
My experiences scootering around in Southeast Asia wasn't much different. Traffic flow was surprisingly efficient in many quite congested uncontrolled intersections. The downside was that accidents were common.
> What would often happen is that the different traffic directions would try to take turns. One direction would get momentum going until someone brave enough in the other direction would poke their car out. Eventually the one direction would stop and the other direction would start going.
That's pretty much how roundabouts work when traffic gets heavy.
Most sane countries do not have 4-way stops. No sane and rational country has 3-out-of-4-way stops, which is the most stupid and dangerous idea ever invented. How could anyone have even thought of suggesting such a thing, let alone allowing it to happen for real - only in America!
For less busy intersections, people just treated them as 4 way stops.
For busier intersections, say a 3 lane road with a 2 lane road crossing it, there was sometimes a police officer to direct traffic. But sometimes not, and that’s when it got interesting. What would often happen is that the different traffic directions would try to take turns. One direction would get momentum going until someone brave enough in the other direction would poke their car out. Eventually the one direction would stop and the other direction would start going.
But sometimes even that could not work. And this is when the volunteer traffic director would appear. Someone driving with a passenger would have their passenger get out and start directing traffic till their car got through and maybe for a couple more minutes. Then that person would go get back in their car and suddenly another volunteer would hop out of another car. Serial volunteer traffic directing is one of my enduring memories of Miami from that time.