1. Overview
This section should be read by all drivers, motorcyclists, cyclists and horse riders. The rules in The Highway Code do not give you the right of way in any circumstance, but they advise you when you should give way to others. Always give way if it can help to avoid an incident.
Yes.
And it doesn't state a general rule of "give way to the right". That's what was asserted upthread.
But tykeboy didn't assert that it was in the Highway Code.
tykeboy2003 wrote: ↑21 Jul 2022, 7:28amThe general rule in he (sic) UK is give way to the right.
Do you think that there is such a "general rule"? I don't.
1 There's a lot of good advice upthread above about trying to avoid harm regardless of anything else.
2 The guidance in the Highway Code about vulnerable users might help to avoid harm even without any specifics on "priority" by increasing awareness. They now need repeated reinforcement through multiple media.
3 In the specific incident I don't understand what road markings and signs were in place. This may be clear in the subsequent discussion and I'm sorry if I've missed this.
I think there is potential for confusion with the new rules v cycle safety advice. For instance, you wouldn't cycle up the left hand side of a lorry turning left, but if there's a cycle lane ( or not ?? ) on the left side you'd potentially have the rite to cycle up the left side and on across the junction the lorry is signaling left into but your bikeability course would tell you not to do that or have I got this thing mixed up?
Where there's confusion there's an added factor to increase the chance of an accident.
There is no "give way to the right" rule in the UK.
It is the general rule on most of the continent, but if we adopted it here it would be "give way to the left" because we drive on the other side of the road. In any case it is not relevant in this situation because this is a signal controlled junction - the whole point of traffic lights being to break the normal rules of priority and allocate priority to different streams of traffic in turn.
While I agree with what has been said above, I do remember a judgment being reported in the mid-1960s in which the judge said there was. I think this has stuck in my memory because the reasoning seemed perverse.
Once upon a time there was no general priority at roundabouts, which didn't matter before the modern design was increasingly installed. I can't remember when general priority was allocated to traffic already on the roundabout beyond saying the mid-1960s. I presume the men from the ministry were pushing for a rule but roundabouts were a form of roulette at a time when traffic was increasing.
Anyway, in the case I remember, the judgment was that priority-to-the-right was a widely recognised rule in other countries and so it applied here, at least on roundabouts. It did seem perverse to me that the judge did not reverse the rule to accommodate driving on the left. Not long after that the modern rule for roundabout priority was introduced generally.
In many if not most on-road situations, priority between vehicles can be deduced from road markings etc.
The reason that roundabouts came late to the continent is that they don't work anticlockwise with the priority to the right rule - they would simply lock up if circulating traffic had to yield to entering traffic.
thirdcrank wrote: ↑23 Jul 2022, 7:22am
Anyway, in the case I remember, the judgment was that priority-to-the-right was a widely recognised rule in other countries and so it applied here, at least on roundabouts. It did seem perverse to me that the judge did not reverse the rule to accommodate driving on the left. Not long after that the modern rule for roundabout priority was introduced generally.
That does indeed seem strange. I would have expected that the law against "not keeping the left" (Highways Act 1835 section 78) meant that the general rule was that one should give way to traffic joining your route from the left when no other markings or signs are present. So roundabouts would need marking or would suffer the same drawback as Pete Owens mentioned for RHD countries.
MJR, mostly pedalling 3-speed roadsters. KL+West Norfolk BUG incl social easy rides http://www.klwnbug.co.uk All the above is CC-By-SA and no other implied copyright license to Cycle magazine.
I presume this stuck in my mind because it seemed so odd (and the fact that I can remember our Co-op number from the 1940s but not what I had for breakfast today, etc.)
The setting for this was that it was only in the late 1950s that there was any significant move to modernise the road network and roundabouts were part of that. Initially, there was no settled priority at roundabouts. Perhaps there's somebody with a Highway Code of that era.
As an example of this, the middle of Bradford was developed in the early 1960s with a number of roundabouts. The absence of a settled priority meant that to keep traffic flowing at peak periods, City of Bradford Police as it was then deployed numerous PCs in white macs and helmet covers at the rate of one per entry to each roundabout + supervisors to co-ordinate them in an attempt to keep the traffic moving on this "modernised" layout.
Without looking anything up, I can't remember the date of the introduction of the rule for priority on the roundabout. I'm pretty sure that when I passed my test (early 1965?) there was no priority at roundabouts. I've a clear memory of getting a lift home from a colleague from initial police training at Harrogate in Autumn 1967 and we came across an MGB smashed up on a roundabout on Scott Hall Road with the horn still sounding. I think that was somebody who had ignored the relatively new rule, rather than evidence that it hadn't yet been introduced.
I'm confident that my memory of the judgment I quoted is correct.
When traffic entering a roundabout has priority over traffic already on the roundabout it is possible for the roundabout traffic to become totally locked even when all exits are clear. Hence our UK rule.
