Badge Kids › Road Badge › Section 5 › Lesson 5.6

Ages 11-16 · Road Badge · Section 5

Junctions, both left turns, and the strategy that comes last

Make a left turn by either lawful method and say why you chose it, and run the four-step hazard strategy at a real junction.

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Step 1 of 10

1Look

Two ways through the same junction

An overhead drawing of a four-way junction with two coloured lines through it: one crossing into the left-turn lane and sweeping round, the other going straight to the far corner, stopping, and setting off again at ninety degrees. — Two lefts

Two lines, one junction, one rider. Both of those are turns you are allowed to make, and choosing the second one is not the timid answer.

2The idea

Junctions are where it happens, and the instinct is backwards

The national cycling body says it plainly: most crashes between riders and drivers happen at junctions, and the countermeasure it names first is not speed or nerve. It is position — being visible and being predictable about where you are going.

And here is the reversal you have to drill. The approach to a junction is where you leave the edge, not where you hug it. The positioning standard lists junctions in its primary-position situations, and state guidance says the same thing from the other end: avoid squeezing by on the right at junctions. Your instinct will be to move right. Move out instead.

3The idea

Two left turns, and both of them are real

The vehicular left. Look behind, signal, move across into the correct lane in good time, and turn as a car would. It is quick, it is what drivers expect, and it needs a proper look, a signal, and a gap.

The two-stage left, also called the box turn. Stay right, go straight across to the far corner, stop, and then set off again on the new road when its signals or its traffic let you. No merging across moving traffic at any point. One state’s code writes both of these out as a choice a rider has, and some towns paint a bike turn box on the ground for exactly this.

4Build it

Draw both lefts

Interactive

Pick your left

Four junctions, one at a time: a quiet crossroads, a wide four-lane road with a left-turn lane, a busy junction with a queue in every direction, and a T-junction with a painted turn box. Draw either left through each and the card plays it back, showing where you would have had to cross moving traffic and where you would not.

Draw the vehicular left through the busy one first. It is not that it cannot be done, it is that you can see exactly how much of it depends on the gap you get.

5Decide

A four-lane road, traffic moving steadily, and you want to turn left.

Yes, and it is a turn, not a workaround. The two-stage left is composed entirely of things you are already allowed to do: go straight, stop, then go straight again. It needs no gap in moving traffic, which is the part of a vehicular left you do not control.

Look at what each one costs. Crossing four lanes needs four gaps that all line up, and you are moving sideways through traffic the whole time. Walking it is always available and never wrong, but it is not the turn — and the two-stage left gets you round as a rider without ever merging across anything moving.

Pick one to carry on.

6The idea

The strategy, and it comes last on purpose

Adult motorcycle training names its perceptual strategy SEE — Search, Evaluate, Execute, calls it the core of a personal safe-riding strategy, and says it links decision-making with visual awareness. It puts SEE at sections seventeen to nineteen of a twenty-section course. The cycle training standard uses four steps and adds one the motorcyclists leave implied: keep looking ahead and behind, close in and far out; anticipate what could happen; judge which of them matters most and prioritise your response; then respond.

Notice where both of them put it: at the end. Not because it is optional but because you cannot spend attention on the road while you are still spending it on the pedal. Everything in the four badges before this one was buying you the attention that this lesson spends.

7Look

Four things at once

A junction photographed from a rider's eye level with four things circled: a car indicating right across your path, a pedestrian at the kerb looking at a phone, a van waiting to pull out of a side road, and a patch of wet metal drain cover on your line. — Prioritise

All four are real and none of them are emergencies yet. The question the strategy asks is not what can you see, it is which one of those do you deal with first.

8Find them

Which of these belong to the four-step strategy?

Tap the ones that count.

Find all 4.

9Say it

Three words from the motorcycle course

Say it out loud before every junction on your next ride

“Search. Evaluate. Execute.”

Say it approaching junctions until it stops being three words and becomes the order your eyes and your hands already work in. It is the same three steps whether you are on this machine or in a car in four years.

10Do it

Before you leave this page

Stand on the pavement at a real junction with an adult for two minutes, not riding. Every time a gap comes, say out loud what you can see, what each thing could do next, and which one you would deal with first. Then walk both left turns through that junction on foot and say which one you would use there and why.

Tick it when you have done it.

Lesson done.

The approach to a junction is where you leave the edge, not where you hug it. Two lawful lefts, and you pick.

Take the Section check

Section 5 · You Are Traffic

5.1You are traffic, and here is the sentence that says so 5.2The two positions, and both of them have names 5.3Control and release, which has the give-back in the name 5.4The rule everybody quotes in half 5.5Four feet, and whose offence a dooring is 5.6Junctions, both left turns, and the strategy that comes last ★Section check

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