The red light we should be allowed to drive through: My gift to Australia

“I don’t want to move to a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light.” To Woody Allen’s New Yorker audience and sensibilities, it was a withering critique. But to every native son of Southern California, it remains a chest-thumping source of pride: the right turn on red.

I’ve just returned to Sydney after my first visit to the city of my birth – Long Beach, California – since I became an Australian citizen last year. I pledged my loyalty, under God, to Australia and its people, and I meant it. Australia is “home” now, and while away there was much that I was eager to return to (not least the way we treat one another). But to be loyal is to be constructive, and I have some good, constructive American critique for my new homeland: we need to embrace the “right” turn on red (which in our case is a left).

It’s a sensational bit of public freedom that every Aussie should be able to enjoy.

Imagine this: you are driving about the city, fighting the traffic and the stress is mounting. Just as you approach an upcoming intersection, ready to hang a left – botheration! – amber and then red, and this even though the cross street is not busy. You come to a complete stop. But instead of staring blankly into the middle distance as your finite mortal seconds tick by, you carefully peer right, and note that no cross traffic is coming. Then, you responsibly check the pedestrian crossings in front of you and to your left, and observe that all pedestrians are safely clear of the road.

Then, magnificence incarnate, you are entrusted by your society to make this safe left-hand turn all under the power of your own good judgment, without the light ever having changed back to green. Bliss!

Fellow citizens of Australia, we need this freedom – and not merely, as it stands, at a handful of scattered intersections with a “left turn on red permitted after stopping” sign. No, on all of them! I put it to Chris Minns, Jacinta Allan and their fellow premiers. Minns raised the speed in tunnels; let’s roll on to another great driving reform!

The advantages go on and on. First, though the turn on red is often thought to be the preserve of wide roads and mid-century grids (such as Long Beach), it has perhaps even more usefulness on our narrow and congested roads. How often are our pre-modern streets one lane short of being able to handle all three of left-turning, right-turning and straight-on traffic? Sydney’s Cleveland Street and the Eastern Distributor – need I say more? Letting a left-turning car make a responsible escape clears the wa