Defensive Driving · Driver Training VideoIntersection Safety

An intersection is a few hundred feet of pavement where every other vehicle on the road gets to cross your path. It is the one place where your size, your stopping distance, and somebody else's bad decision all show up at the same moment.

Start with the approach

Your eyes should be working the intersection long before your bumper gets there. Count how long that green has been green. A light that was already green when it came into view is a stale green, and it is about to change.

Now the yellow

At fifty five miles an hour you are covering about eighty feet every second, and a loaded rig on dry pavement needs well over four hundred feet to stop. That is a football field and a half, and that is perception, reaction, and braking all added up.

Left turns

This is the one that kills. You are crossing traffic that is closing on you at highway speed, and you are accelerating eighty thousand pounds from a dead stop. A car needs a gap. You need that gap and then some. If you have any doubt about the gap, you do not have the gap.

Right turns

Your trailer does not follow your tractor. It off tracks to the inside and cuts the corner. So keep the rear of your vehicle close to the curb, and swing wide as you finish the turn, not as you start it.

Before any turn, work the mirrors twice, and look for what is small and quiet. A pedestrian already in the crosswalk. A cyclist coming up on your right. A motorcycle sitting in your blind spot. A right turn across a bike lane is a classic.

Do not enter an intersection you cannot clear. If traffic is stacked up on the far side, hold where you are, even on a green. Seventy feet of truck parked across the box, or across a set of tracks, is the worst place your truck can be.

And when the light turns green, do not just go. Take a beat, look left, then right, then left again. The red light runner is a crash you did not cause and still have to survive.