Restricting Right Turns on Red

[SammyOES]

I don’t see why turning right on a red after checking for pedestrians on the intersecting street is inherently any more problematic than turning right on a green after checking for pedestrians on the initial street.

It is worse because on a red light drivers end up focusing to their left knowing that’s where traffic is going to come from. It’s easy to forget to check back to your right for pedestrians/bikes when you see a gap in traffic to your left and just start moving.

On a green light you’ve got the right away so you just need a glance to the straight/left to make sure nobody is doing anything stupid and then you can focus mostly on the forward path of your car and anybody that’s in your way.

Red light turns also seem more rushed in a lot of cases.

All that to be said, I definitely get how they’re worse. But it would be really silly to me to get rid of them region wide because there are a ton of places where they help move traffic at basically no increased danger to pedestrians.