Q: Is there a rule or law about the distance of visibility delivery trucks must leave for motorists entering a road from adjacent roads when they are parked delivering goods? I’ve encountered delivery trucks that block the view of oncoming traffic making it difficult to pull onto the highway without cutting someone off.
A: I’ll start with what I already know: Obstructed views contribute to traffic crashes. Obvious? Yes, but also supported by data. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) studied various contributing factors to collisions in intersections and confirmed what is clearly evident. But they were able to express it in a percentage. In an analysis of a nationally representative sample of 787,236 intersection collisions, turning with an obstructed view contributed to 7.8 percent of the crashes.
Roughly eight percent might seem like a small amount and, as a proportion, it is. But a small percentage of a really big number is still a pretty big number. In 2018 drivers crashed in intersections 2,943,716 times. If the percentage in NHTSA’s research holds true when scaled up to all intersection crashes in the US (and we have no reason to believe it wouldn’t), that’s nearly 230,000 crashes caused by an obstructed view.
We don’t have a law that says, “Don’t park where it blocks someone’s view of traffic.” But we do have a law that puts limits on where you can park, and some of those prohibited locations could potentially block another driver’s view. This law covers, by my count, 18 different locations you’re not allowed to park, so I’m not going to cover them all here. If you just have to know them all, you can find them in chaper 46, title 60, section 570 of the Revised Code of Washington.
Instead, I’ll hit the three most relevant highlights: You can’t park within five feet of a driveway, 20 feet of a crosswalk, or 30 feet of a stop sign, yield sign, flashing light or traffic control signal. Those restrictions should eliminate most obstructed views, but there’s no guarantee that it’ll prevent all of them.
And what about private property? Is it illegal for a delivery truck in a parking lot to block your view of oncoming traffic? There are some rules about vision triangles (the corner of a lot at an intersection that is prohibited from having visual obstructions) but those rules are about fixed objects like fences and tall shrubs. If a delivery truck in a parking lot obstructs your view, you’re encountering a poor parking lot design which is unfortunate but, as far as I can tell, not illegal.
It’s unlikely that if you encounter a parked vehicle that’s blocking your view, a police officer or tow truck will remedy the situation before you clear the intersection. So what should you do? The reality is, we sometimes have to navigate a less-than-perfect driving environment. Which leads us to the real take-away of the NHTSA study mentioned earlier.
The number one cause of intersection crashes, according to the study, is inadequate surveillance. If you’re paranoid you might think NHTSA has decided the plurality of crashes are caused by not enough people spying on us. I assure you, that’s not what they mean. Forty-four percent of intersection crashes happen because we don’t spend enough time scanning the driving environment before entering the intersection. One hundred-fifty years ago the top speed for humans was whatever you could get your horse to run. Our eyes and brains are designed to capture data at speeds much slower than our current modes of travel. And intersections are the most complex driving situations because we have information (in the form of multi-ton projectiles) coming at us from multiple directions. In order to successfully navigate an intersection we need to take time, sometimes more than our intuition thinks necessary, to fully grasp everything that’s happening.
It’s not just the person at a stop sign waiting to pull into the intersection that has to look. If you’re cruising along and your view of potential traffic entering the roadway is blocked, expect the possibility that someone who also doesn’t see you might pull out. It’s less than ideal, but if you’re ready for it, you’re more likely to avoid a collision. By law, and just as an attempt at being good humans, we all have a responsibility to make sure we don’t crash, no matter who has the right-of-way.