IN THE LAST few weeks, a new driving practice – more accurately a “malpractice” – has first taken root and then taken off in Barbados. Until late last year, I hardly ever noticed anyone making a right turn into a side street against oncoming traffic.
I never noticed it because it was almost always done correctly: the driver would occupy the centre of the road, as far as possible, allowing cars behind him to pass “inside” him on his left and go ’long their way while he waited in the middle of the road for a break in oncoming traffic to turn right.
The lane markings on the ABC Highway and at most junctions wide enough to allow markings reflect the proper way a right turn on a two-way street should be approached.
Just before Christmas, though, I found myself noticing more and more people making a bizarre approach to a right turn, something you could properly term a “left hand” right turn.
It has now become the norm in Barbados, it seems to me, for a driver making a right turn across oncoming traffic to occupy, not the centre of the road, or the extreme right of his own lane as far as possible, but the far left of his own lane: prior to making a right turn, drivers are now moving as close to the left edge of their own side of the road as they can.
If you see a car looking as though it’s parked on the left shoulder, then, don’t drive past it humming a happy tune: it’s probably about to make a sharp right turn, because a very large number of drivers now think the right thing to do is to swing out as far to the left as possible before suddenly wrapping their steering wheels all the way back over and turning right.
You can understand the tactic in drivers over the age of, say, 60. This was how they used to make right turns 45 years ago, but they had a good reason for it: few cars of that time came with the now standard power steering and it was much easier, physically, to execute the manoeuvre of a right turn if you had more time and more room to allow more “play” on your steering wheel by swinging left before you swung right.
But you can turn a steering wheel through 360 degrees with your little finger in most cars nowadays. Why, then, are Bajans lining up with the left edge of the road to make a right turn? Somebody’s going to be killed by it; probably me.
This kind of left-hand right turn goes against the admirable Bajan instinct for allowing others their space. Cars heading east (towards Oistins from the Ministry of Agriculture) that want to turn right into the Shell gas station near Top Rock Roundabout are now veering so far to the left the driver behind them – several times last week, me – is legitimately led to think they are turning left into Graeme Hall – but then they swing back and, if you’re not careful, crash smack-bang into you, minding your own business, exercising due care and diligence on the road; and still getting licked up by some jackass.
