Q: When driving on a four-lane road through a neighborhood, is it safer to drive in the left lane and risk a head-on collision, or the right with less space to react to people or objects unexpectedly entering the roadway?
A: There’s that scene in Empire Strikes Back when Han Solo is trying to evade several TIE Fighters by going into an asteroid field. C-3PO warns him, “Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to one.” Han replies, “Never tell me the odds.”
Han Solo demonstrates something called “probability neglect,” a cognitive bias that causes us to either completely ignore or grossly overestimate the odds of something happening. If you drive a car without considering how your driving choices influence your safety, you’re doing the same thing, but with cars and humans instead of asteroids. In fiction, probability neglect usually works out for the protagonist. In real life, not so much, so I’m glad you’re asking questions about safety and risk.
There are many driving decisions we make that go beyond the requirements of the law, like your question about lane choice and, I’ll add, lane position. The law requires you to drive “within a single lane,” but it doesn’t specify where in that lane you should drive. On a two-lane road, an attentive driver might move more toward the center line when they observe cars parked on the side of the road (where an occupant could open a door into the lane of travel), when there are driveways entering the road, or when kids are playing in a yard near the street. If there’s oncoming traffic, the driver may choose to drive closer to the shoulder, allowing more room between themselves and oncoming traffic (and consequently, more time to respond to a driver drifting out of the oncoming lane). When there’s both, well, it’s a judgement call, isn’t it?
On a four-lane road, you have not only the position in your lane, but a choice between two lanes. You asked about safety, but I should also mention that there’s the law. At some point you’ve probably been stuck behind a slow car in the left lane of the freeway, hoping they’ll eventually notice the “Slower traffic keep right” signs. That same law applies to all multi-lane roads. If you’re on a road with two lanes going in one direction, the law requires that you drive in “the right-hand lane then available for traffic” with some exceptions. One of those is moving left for merging traffic, so if you see a car coming out of a driveway, moving to the left lane is both a safe and law-approved move.
You didn’t ask about the law, though. You asked about safety. If there were a scenario where violating traffic law avoided a crash, I could understand the temptation to make that choice. But in this situation, the right lane is probably the safer bet anyway. According to data from WSDOT’s crash portal, eleven percent of traffic fatalities in 2021 were “opposite direction” collisions. That’s information that Han Solo would probably ignore, but you might find useful in choosing your lane.
In addition to lane choice, we can’t forget about speed. If you’re an aware driver, you probably intuitively drive slower than the speed limit when you’re in a neighborhood with lots of driveways and pedestrian activity. If you find that the posted speed limit is faster than you want to go, given the circumstances, it’s fine to slow down until you’re at the right speed for your situation.
A new South Carolina state law requires drivers to only use the far left hand lane on controlled-access highways when overtaking and passing another vehicle. While there are some exceptions, driving continuously in the left hand lane may result in a $25 fine. So, added reason not to hang out in the passing lane.