Below is a sketch of an intersection that is the main bottleneck of my commute home from work.  I’ve had a question about right-of-way and I’m curious if any of you know the answer.  In the sketch below, if cars A and B both turned into lane 2, colliding with one another, who would be at fault?

Not to scale.  Lanes 1 and 2 are actually long enough to hold about 15-20 cars each.  Cars A and B would actually be nearly parallel to one another.

This is an unusual design; typically lane 2 would be created first, and then lane 1 would be created to the left of it.  Instead, we have a lane created in the middle of two lanes.  On the one hand, car A has already turned into lane 1, and now he’d be changing lanes back.  But on the other hand, car A has gotten into the left-turn lanes, and now he wants to pick which left turn lane to use.  It should also be noted that where lane 2 is created, both lines are marked with short dashes.  If one of them were marked with regular dashes it would be clear.

Now what makes this really annoying is that from around 5:00 to 5:45, there are a lot of people that need to turn left here.  So there is a line of cars backing up well into the area that is only two lanes, so there is a long line of cars in lane 3.  What happens is that nearly all of these cars end up turning only into lane 1.  But a few people go past the traffic in lane 4, then move left at the last moment to get into lane 2.  So they only have to wait for the stoplight to complete one or maybe two cycles, as opposed to four or five.  This makes the problem worse, because the line of cars coming out of lane 2 makes it practically impossible for a person who was waiting patiently in lane 3 to merge into lane 2.  I’ve often thought about going from lane 3 into lane 1, and then continuing straight into lane 2 (making the person who skipped the line have to wait).  But I’m afraid if that guy hit me it would be my fault, or we’d both be at fault.  And my sense of politeness keeps me from passing the line and merging into lane 2.  After all, I wouldn’t want anyone to road rage me.

So what I actually do when it’s backed up like this is take lane 4 straight through the intersection, then move left and make a U-turn at the next break in the median, then make a right turn onto the road I want to go on.  This is actually quite easy since a good two-thirds of the traffic either turns left or right at this intersection.