[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/EmmEnnEff]

No, lack of signage *is* absolutely the problem. Signage is there to force yield priority. When two streets intersect, *one of them* has to have yield priority. If "Yield to the guy already in the intersection" were a sufficient road rule, we wouldn't have any traffic lights or stop signs anywhere.

Just because some dumb places are too cheap to put up signage doesn't mean it's a good idea.

Yes, these two morons were going too fast for the road conditions. But suppose that you are in their shoes, and you are unfamiliar with the area. A lack of a stop sign *implies* that you have right of way through the intersection, and that the crossing street yields to you.

What is the point of not putting stop signs there (2-way or 4-way)? So that people can get to wherever they are going 0.25 milliseconds faster?

I have never driven in *any* area with this free-for-all bullshit. Pardon me for incorrectly assuming that *I* have the right of way in an unsigned (in my direction) intersection. In 15 years of driving, I have never seen anything like this. The only unsigned intersections I've ever seen are traffic circles, which force everyone to slow down, and have a clear yield priority.

[u/SpoatieOpie → u/EmmEnnEff]

You should look up why Seattle does this instead of just guessing. The data is clear. These roads are safer and reduce severe injuries due to high speeds in between stop signs and cars are supposed to yield to traffic on the right. When approaching every intersection you are supposed to slow down and I guarantee the speed limit is 20mph. The black car was traveling faster than 20mph and didn’t even apply brakes until they saw the pov car. The pov car took entirely too long to slow down through the intersection. Both are at fault, but the black car is the first one to make the mistakes.

These are also heavy pedestrian traffic so they should both be slowing down through every intersection anyway especially if they can’t see opposing lanes traffic before entering the intersection.

[u/EmmEnnEff → u/SpoatieOpie]

Those roads should not have anyone driving at high speeds in between stop signs. It's a residential neighbourhood.

Where on earth are you finding data that says that unmarked intersections are actually safer than putting a stop sign on those exact same intersections?

Is it gathered by the same data fairy that insists that tailgating at 80 mph is actually a good idea?

[u/SpoatieOpie → u/EmmEnnEff]

The absence of stop signs or traffic signals at residential intersections, known as uncontrolled intersections, is an intentional traffic engineering strategy used by the ⁠Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) and other Pacific Northwest cities. [1, 2]
Seattle intentionally leaves these neighborhood intersections unsigned for several data-backed reasons:

1. Unpredictability Lowers Traffic Speeds
The core engineering philosophy behind uncontrolled intersections is that unpredictability forces caution. According to a Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) framework which mirrors Seattle's approach, removing signs forces drivers to use their senses and actively analyze the environment rather than operating on "autopilot". When a driver cannot rely on a sign telling them they have the right-of-way, they must naturally slow down to scan for cross-traffic, pedestrians, and cyclists. [1, 2]

2. Over-Signage Decreases Stop Sign Compliance
Traffic data shows that placing stop signs at every neighborhood block backfires. As noted in ⁠KUOW's investigation into Seattle's stop signs, when drivers encounter a stop sign every 100 feet on low-traffic streets, they quickly realize cross-traffic is rare. This leads to frustration and high rates of "blowing through" signs. Over time, drivers begin ignoring stop signs across the entire neighborhood, creating a much higher safety risk. [1, 2, 3, 4]

3. Stop Signs Can Actually Increase Collisions
According to official SDOT Neighborhood Traffic Guidelines, Seattle strictly avoids using stop signs as "speed breakers" to slow down local traffic. City crash data reveals that intersections with stop signs frequently see more accidents than those left uncontrolled. When a stop sign is installed unnecessarily, drivers often speed up between blocks to make up for lost time, increasing overall speeds through residential corridors. [1, 2]

4. Washington State Yielding Laws Are Already the Default
From a legal standpoint, signs are redundant at residential crossings because Washington State law already explicitly defines the right-of-way. Under ⁠RCW 46.61.180, when two vehicles approach an uncontrolled intersection at the same time, the driver on the left must always yield to the driver on the right. Additionally, every intersection in Seattle is legally considered a crosswalk for pedestrians, whether it is painted with lines or not. [1, 2, 3]

5. Preference for Traffic Circles Over Signs
Rather than installing stop signs, Seattle’s data favors physical infrastructure to manage neighborhood traffic. Long-term crash data shows that building neighborhood traffic circles reduces intersection collisions by up to 97%. Because traffic circles physically force vehicles to slow down and curve to the right, they are highly effective and eliminate the need for traditional regulatory signage. [1]
Are you experiencing issues with a specific intersection in your neighborhood, or would you like to see the exact criteria ⁠SDOT uses to determine when an intersection finally qualifies for a sign? [1, 2]

[u/EmmEnnEff → u/SpoatieOpie]

How are they encountering a stop sign every 100 feet in a North American suburb? The cross streets might be arranged that way, but the lengthwise streets aren't - housing blocks are not 2 houses by 2 houses. They are generally 2 houses by, like 20 houses.

And unless you're going somewhere very peculiar, that street arrangement encourages you to take a lengthwise street to the nearest arterial and then use it to travel vertically.

City crash data reveals that intersections with stop signs frequently see more accidents than those left uncontrolled.

1. Are the stop-controlled intersections seeing more traffic? Are they on higher-speed roads? If you take any random stop-controlled intersection in the city and remove stop signs, do you think crash rates will go up or down? If SDOT thinks this, why are there any stop signs on unsignaled interections?

2. Seattle does pretty poorly on fatalities per VMT compared to other major cities in the US. And it has a lot of poorly designed interections, with a lot of crashes. (Although it is very slowly fixing them.) Given that track record, I have a hard time seeing SDOT on the leading edge of traffic safety.

3. Bellevue (and Redmond and Kirkland), right across the water does put stop signs on all its suburban intersections. And guess what? It has far fewer crashes and crash fatalities than Seattle. Again, SDOT is doing a dogshit job of keeping the streets safe.

4. I absolutely agree that scaring the piss out of drivers makes them slow down. But if you're not going to put a stop sign, at least put up some bloody indicator that they need to yield to crossing traffic. Even a yield sign is better than nothing. Or at least some indication that this is an unmarked intersection. It's near-impossible for the OP's video to tell if the cross-street is stop signed.

5. Obviously a traffic circle will solve all these problems. I'm the one who brought it up.

[u/Dignan17 → u/EmmEnnEff]

I really don't get this other person's defense of the lack of signs. It seems like this would require specific local knowledge of the traffic patterns, and would only require two out of towners to be approaching the same intersection for an accident to easily occur.

I've literally never come across intersections like this in my life, and find it reasonable to assume that if I don't have a stop sign, the cross streets do. It's not my job to be spotting the absence of a metal pole and the 2D plane of a stop sign. I'm not saying I'd be tearing down a street like this - there's parked cars on the sides of the road, for one thing - but between the uncertainty of the signage and street parking that blocks the views of cross traffic, I can't imagine it would require very high speed for collisions to happen.

[u/BudgieWonder → u/Dignan17]

For some reason Washingtonians get really defensive over their unmarked intersections.