Many U.S. drivers may take their ability to turn right at a red light for granted. But at more and more intersections across the nation, that maneuver, which entails a driver fully stopping at a red light and yielding to pedestrians and other traffic before turning right, is no longer allowed. Cities including Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle are adopting or considering widespread bans on right-turn-on-red to address surging fatalities and serious injuries among pedestrians and cyclists.
Despite this policy trend, questions about the efficacy of such bans remain. Although some research shows that right-turns-on-red increase conflict between vehicles and vulnerable road users, other studies show that such crashes don’t typically result in fatalities and serious injuries for pedestrians, indicating that, on their own, bans on the maneuver may not substantially address road safety challenges.
“The elimination of right-turn-on-red is no silver bullet,” said Eric Dumbaugh, an urban planning professor and associate director of the Collaborative Sciences Center for Road Safety at Florida Atlantic University.
Pedestrian traffic fatalities in the U.S. hit 7,318 in 2023, declining 5.4% year over year after reaching a 40-year high in 2022, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association. Pedestrian deaths rose 77% from 2010 to 2022, while all other traffic fatalities increased 22%, the GHSA said in June. Pedestrian deaths remain 14.1% above the pre-pandemic level measured in 2019.
In response to rising deaths among pedestrians and cyclists, some road safety advocates support banning drivers of motor vehicles from turning right at red stop lights, which is largely prohibited in New York City and the European Union.
“The single most important thing you can do is prioritize safety over speed in cities, and there's a whole host of policies that do that, including [banning] right-turn-on-red,” said Mike McGinn, executive director of America Walks, a nonprofit organization that promotes walkability. “Maintaining right-turn-on-red is promoting speed and lack of awareness of pedestrians. Banning it is promoting and prioritizing people moving safely.”
Public officials have worried about the road safety effects of allowing right-turn-on-red since California enacted in 1937 the nation’s first law requiring signage at intersections permitting the driving maneuver. Turning right on red was banned by default in most Eastern states until the 1970s, while California and other Western states had mostly allowed it since the 1940s.
A turning point came in 1975 when Congress enacted the Energy Policy and Conservation Act in response to the energy crisis and rising fuel prices. In an effort to lower fuel consumption by reducing idling at traffic signals, the law required states to allow right-turn-on-red at most intersections to receive federal highway funding. That led every state and Washington, D.C., to adopt the practice by 1980.
What right-turn-on-red research shows
Proponents of blanket bans argue that allowing right-turn-on-red leads to more crashes between motor vehicles and pedestrians and cyclists due to driver inattention, pointing to research showing that drivers mostly focus on traffic coming from their left rather than pedestrians and cyclists on their right.
Indeed, research shows that allowing right-turn-on-red leads to more conflicts between cars and pedestrians. For instance, permitting right-turn-on-red led to a 43% to 107% increase in pedestrian crashes and a 72% to 123% rise in cyclist crashes, according to a 1982 study by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The same paper, which analyzed crash data collected in the mid-to-late 1970s in three states, including Ohio, New York and Wisconsin, and two cities — Los Angeles and New Orleans — found that 67% of pedestrians and 75% of cyclists involved in crashes came from the driver's right.
The District Department of Transportation in Washington, D.C., found that no-turn-on-red restrictions at 74 intersections led to a 92% decline in the number of drivers that failed to yield to pedestrians, according to a study published by the Institute of Transportation Engineers in 2022.
However, despite the large decreases in pedestrian crashes and conflicts associated with right-turn-on-red bans, studies show that such measures may not make a big dent in pedestrian and cycling fatalities.
While NHTSA’s 1982 study found large increases in pedestrian and cycling crashes, such incidents led to “few fatalities and generally low injury severities” due to “the low speeds at impact,” the agency said.
In addition, NHTSA found that 84 fatal crashes occurred at intersections permitting right-turn-on-red from 1982-1992, making up 0.2% of all roadway fatalities, according to a 1994 report to Congress. Federal data on traffic fatalities, however, does not include whether a signal was red at the time of the crash.
“Therefore, the actual number of fatal [right-turn-on-red] crashes is somewhere between zero and 84 and may be closer to zero than 84,” the report says.
The same report found, using data from four states, that just 0.2% of all fatal pedestrian and bicyclist crashes were due to a vehicle turning right on red.
Similarly, about one pedestrian fatality and less than one cyclist fatality results from a right-turn-on-red every two years in California, according to an unpublished analysis of state traffic data by the National Motorists Association, which advocates for motorists’ rights. The same study found such collisions led to 1.2 serious injuries among pedestrians and two serious injuries among cyclists each year in California.
“If you look at the data, banning right-turn-on-red does not make a lot of sense from an area-wide or a citywide standpoint,” said Jay Beeber, executive director of policy at the NMA.
Politically risky
Local officials risk politicizing pedestrian and cyclist safety by focusing on blanket right-turn-on-red bans, which some people view as anti-motorist, FAU’s Dumbaugh said. Blanket bans “might do more harm than good in the long-term” because they won’t reduce pedestrian deaths significantly and could spark backlash if people think they are illegitimate, Dumbaugh said.
Houston residents, for instance, voted to ban red-light cameras in the city over privacy and fairness concerns, as well as questions about their effectiveness. Banning right-turn-on-red could meet a similar fate if cities aren’t careful, Dumbaugh said. “It's the kind of policy that can create antagonism for other things that might have a more meaningful impact,” Dumbaugh said.
Rather than banning right-turn-on-red citywide, local governments may want to ban it at especially dangerous intersections or times to get the most benefit at the lowest political and economic cost, Beeber and Dumbaugh said.
Lowering posted vehicle speed limits, instating traffic-calming measures, reducing permissive left turns and improving pedestrian and cycling infrastructure are more likely to help cities achieve their Vision Zero goals, experts said.
Banning right-turn-on-red may be part of the solution, “but if we're looking to really get the numbers down, there needs to be a bigger policy framework that it fits within,” said Ken McLeod, policy director at the League of American Bicyclists.
