In Oregon, if you are at a stoplight on a two-way street at an intersection with a one-way street, you can make a left turn without waiting for the light to change. And you can do so legally. Every time I do this, I feel like I'm getting away with a secret permission, as it were. Something only the Oregon traffic law cognoscenti have. The car behind me never follows my left turn and will wait for a green light if they're executing a left turn.

Being able to turn left on a red light onto a one-way street from a two-way street is a distinction Oregon shares with only three other states: neighbors Washington and Idaho, plus Michigan. An exclusive club, to be sure.

True, most states [37 or so] allow the much more common left turn on red from a one-way street to a one-way street. [It seems the mirror image of a right turn on red in terms of traffic flow and safety considerations.]

I don't come across the opportunity to execute this left-on-red maneuver often. Face it, two-way streets intersecting one-way streets are comparatively rare as intersections go. So when I see the chance, I invariably take it. It's there in Oregon Revised Statutes 811.360.

I would suspect that given the obscurity of this traffic law--and its nonexistence in most of the country--many seeing this left turn would regard it a traffic violation on par with running a red light or rolling past a stop sign. And given how seldom I see other drivers make this left turn--95% plus simply wait out the light--I would suspect even being a native Oregonian and having seen this traffic law oddity once in the driver's test booklet is no guarantee it stuck in working memory.

So there it is for the asking: the opportunity to do something most of the driving-on-the-right-side-of-the-road world views as illegal and thereby flaunt one's knowledge of this obscure loophole.

This is not to say a traffic cop, perhaps a new transplant to Oregon, might do a double-take and hustle after you to write you up for violating a red light signal ... and not having ORS 811.360 in hand, the two of you might have that date in court. By then, I'm sure the traffic cop would have got smart on the matter and the whole citation would be thrown out in the interest of not wasting everybody's time.

In the meantime, I'll continue to make left turns on red from two-way streets, knowing that my gotcha will trump any policeman's gotcha in Oregon [and those three other like-minded states].

Image credit: google images: centerlinesupply.com

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Read Charlie Dickinson's story collection, The Cat at Light's End, as an ebook in these downloadable formats:

.mobi (Kindle)
.epub (most other readers)
.pdf (for PCs)

Also, a flash fiction, "Ylena Thinks Nyet," is at Cigale Literary Magazine.

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