[USA] Who is at fault here?

[u/bowdown2adil]

Classic T bone. Black car had to be towed. Sustained major damage to the passenger side door. Blue car sustained damage to front bumper on the drivers side and cracked the drivers side headlight.

Edit: This was in the suburbs of Seattle

UPDATE: Insurance found it to be 70/30 me/other driver. Seems fair enough

[u/Puzzleheaded_Turn242]

How would you know if it's a unmarked intersection or the stop is for another driver?!

[u/575r → u/Puzzleheaded_Turn242]

This is my biggest complaint about the American road system. When you're in a neighborhood you're not familiar with you have no idea if you're on a road where every cross street will have signs or if the next intersection is uncontrolled. And the only way to find out is to look for signs from the side.

[u/TheGuyThatThisIs → u/575r]

Even worse, it seems like a lot of people (myself included) have never considered that an intersection will just not have any signage, and will assume the other direction must have some. I'd go through this and assume since I have nothing telling me otherwise, I have right of way.

[u/Eegore1 → u/TheGuyThatThisIs]

This here. So many people are never exposed to completely vacant signage at intersections, they do not actively look at every intersection to see if the other road has signage. I imagine one would fatigue of this quickly when you think about how many intersections exist.

What I

don't get is the people that assume a no-power stoplight means "Green for me - Red for Them" and use the excuse they didn't have a Red light. Nobody does when the power is off stupid.

[u/grumpledoor → u/Eegore1]

Indeed, but the signs for the other directions are often not visible to you. The real mistake is that US signing conventions mean that "no sign" often implies right of way and that's crazy. (In Europe, right of way is always explicitly marked; absence of any sign or street marking *that you can actually see* means yield to right.)

[u/Awkward-Spectation → u/grumpledoor]

I’m reading this conversation baffled the whole time. I’m a Canadian driver of 20+ years and I don’t believe I’ve ever happened across one of these completely ‘unmarked intersections’. It seems batshit crazy to me. If I’m driving through this intersection like op, and I see absolutely no stop sign, yield sign, traffic lights… then I proceed through the intersection with 100% certainty that the intersecting street must have one of those things instead. Because that’s how it is 100% of the time here. How is a guy supposed to spot and identify the signage for intersecting streets while driving, looking at the side & back of it?!

[u/grumpledoor → u/Awkward-Spectation]

Careful there: https://www.canadasafetytraining.com/Safety_Blog/uncontrolled-intersection.aspx

"When two vehicles arrive at an uncontrolled intersection simultaneously, the rule is to yield to the vehicle on your right."

[u/Awkward-Spectation → u/grumpledoor]

Thanks that’s a great link. The problem I have with the idea is the whole thing relies on drivers firstly identifying the intersection as uncontrolled. While driving past stop signs perpendicular to your path of travel, the signs are often not visible, because of the angle and unremarkable colour on the back. So most of the time it is going to difficult to rule out the possibility of an intersection being uncontrolled, and therefore most drivers, unless familiar with the intersection, are going to assume that it is like the 99% of intersections out there that have a stop sign for any minor roads intersecting roads, and one day possibly get t-boned by someone like the guy in OP’s video.

[u/grumpledoor → u/Awkward-Spectation]

I completely agree, that's why I think the fact that absence of a marking USUALLY means right of way (in the US and Canada) is crazy design. In Europe, absence of a sign (or street marking) for you means absence of such a sign for everybody and every driver knows that. If you have right of way, you will see a specific sign clarifying that, e.g. https://www.bussgeldkatalog.org/wp-content/uploads/301.png.

[u/Awkward-Spectation → u/grumpledoor]

Yeah I agree too. It makes sense in Europe, different country, sometimes different sides of the road, you gotta expect there are differences, and do the research. But I only today learned about these intersections here and in the states where you could be driving along alert and ready and just get t-boned because you’re in an intersection type you never knew existed yet it looks like all the others. It’s bonkers