Indirect lefts: how to improve what most cyclists do anyway

I find that my lane position when making a vehicular left varies. If I'm early enough in line for the light that I won't miss the left turn phase on the coming cycle (particularly on Spadina, where there's no option to make a left turn outside of the left turn phase), then I'll take the lane.

If I feel it desirable to filter forward though, then I'll position myself on the rightmost side of the rightmost left-turn-only lane. If there's no dedicated left turn lane, then there usually isn't a dedicated left turn signal, or a long enough line of left-turners to keep me from taking the leftmost lane.

I haven't ridden along Harbord in a dog's age. Are the bike boxes ahead or behind the pedestrian crossing? (Actually, I can't imagine them being ahead of the pedestrian crossings, because it wouldn't be real safe for pedestrains with bicycles rolling through, would it?)

The reason I ask is that indirect lefts have problems at intersections with a lot of bike and pedestrian traffic. It's hard to position yourself on the far corner without either blocking through cyclists, or getting into the pedestrian crosswalk and thus blocking pedestrians.

I guess if you have the full signal cycle, you can dismount and walk across, no worries. Riding across, especially when trying to make a late signal, means you'll have to nail the brakes just as you reach the far side. On a busy cycle route like College, that invites being rear-ended by following cyclists (bicycles don't have brake lights).

So trying to do an indirect left turn at say College and Bathurst is going to be tough to do without making others have to duck around you.

Also, it means that once you've made your "left", you start out as the light turns green with all the other traffic. My general preference is to go through a light later in the phase, as I'd rather have all the cars jockeying for position ahead of me rather than beside me, or behind me trying to pass. Not that this keeps me from filtering up when going straight; however there I do have a chance to size up the cars, and can for example take the opportunity to head to the left if any are signaling right.

By the way, there is a cast-in-concrete indirect left at Brown's Line and Lake Shore.

Here's a picture. The bike lane is on your right. Continuing along puts you westbound on Lake Shore. If you want to go east, you duck to the right of the right-hand yellow/black striped marker post and swing around the concrete island. When all is clear, cross the traffic lane to the short continuation of the bike lane, visible by the left-hand yellow/black marker post.

The satellite view might clarify this (or maybe not).

It took me about three years to figure out why that island was there. Needless to say, no one uses it. There are precious few cyclists riding over the Brown's Line bridge, and I would guess half or so use the sidewalks anyway.

Since a bicycle is a "vehicle" it can use the whole left turn lane to make a left turn. However, if there are streetcar tracks or heavy lines of traffic, I switch over to the "left hook turn" or "pedestrian style" both to save time and safety.

Okay, gridlock's many joys may be semi-unique to downtown at rush hour. One really big problem is that cars turning right are often backed up for a long way, because they're stuck waiting for pedestrians.

So when traffic starts moving, the right lane often doesn't. If you continue to filter up on the right, sooner or later you'll be to the right of a right-turning car, and that's a very bad place to be. Now you have to make a right-angle left-hand turn, squeeze between the front of one car and the back of the next one, and then to a right-angle right-hand turn to get past the right-turning car on the left side. With traffic in the second lane zipping through the intersection, that's not too good either.

All this presumes that there won't be a bus or car up close to the curb so you can't really get by on the right anyway.

Southbound on Yonge, I often move entirely into the left lane to get past right-turning cars at King or Wellington or Front (note that due to construction, the latter two are way worse than usual anyway). Fortunately Yonge is downhill and it's the start of my ride, so why not sprint a bit?

Bike lanes are nice, but then there are the bike lanes on Yonge where, south of the railway tracks, a southbound cyclist gets to compete with southbound cars backed up in a long line to make a right turn onto Lake Shore west. Here again, once you're beside the unmoving line of right-turning cars, it's really tough to get to the left of them.

Ironically, it's a lot easier to filter on the right on streets with parking, such as Queen. But there you're automatically entered for the door prize.

Sometimes the indirect left is quicker, depends on traffic. For safety reasons I usually do it more often at intersections with criss-crossing streetcar tracks. Like people who posted above, University (from Queen and south of) is a common stretch to do it as well, but it depends on the time of day.

If it's not an easy pass through the intersection because of heavy traffic and multi-directional, I just use the pedestrian signals. Spadina/Queen is another area I commonly do indirect lefts, especially in early evening between the PM rush and sundown.