Signal before you brake
Nine conversations say the indicator goes on before your foot goes down, so the car behind knows why you are slowing. Then what a fast blink means.
Built from drivers arguing about a thing they were all taught and half of them stopped doing: thirty conversations, 422 accounts, 2012 to 2024. From the nine conversations that say signal before you brake, the nine that say a fast blink is a lamp out, the four that say a signal is about where you are going, the two that carry the British mirror-signal-manoeuvre routine, the two that say signal on an empty road, the three-to-one argument about places where a signal invites a cut-in, and two countries’ official rules read alongside them.
You brake for the turn, then flick the indicator as the wheel goes round, and the car behind sits on your bumper or leans on the horn, and you cannot see what you did wrong. Or the indicator has started clicking twice as fast and you are wondering what that costs. The people in these conversations — thirty of them, 422 accounts, 2012 to 2024 — are the source here. Two countries’ official driving rules were read alongside them.
Put the indicator on before your foot touches the brake, so the driver behind knows why you are slowing before you slow.
The order
Nine separate conversations say it in the same order: signal, then brake. The reason is not the turn; it is the car behind. A brake light tells them only that you are slowing, and one account says that a driver who sees brakes with no reason brakes harder than you did, and the driver behind them harder again, and a chain forms back down the road for nothing. A signal that goes on first says why, and they ease off instead of guessing. One account says the sequence for a turn lane is signal, move, then brake if you need to, and stay in your lane until the turn rather than drifting early; one account says a turn at a junction and a lane change on a fast road are not the same manoeuvre, and the speed rules differ, but the signal-first part does not. One account says it matters most in front of a lorry, which cannot stop the way you can.
One caution and one account say the plain version of this fails on a short slip road, where there is not room to slow gently after signalling — the answer there is an earlier signal, not a later one. Four accounts in one note, three in another and two each in three more say the same thing about the roads they drive: the drivers around them signal late, signal as they turn, or do not signal at all, and two accounts in one note say people who passed a test doing it right stopped doing it afterwards. This page is not one of the accounts who call that stupidity; one account in these conversations says the tone of how do you not know this teaches nothing, and the page agrees.
What the signal is for
Four separate conversations draw the distinction that fixes most signalling: an indicator is not a description of what your hands are doing, it is a statement of where you intend to go, sent early enough for other people to act on it. One account puts it as intention, not permission — you are informing, not asking — and one account says the opposite mistake is as bad: waiting for a gap to appear before you signal means the gap does not come, because the drivers around you did not know you wanted it. One account says a late or vague signal frightens people, because they read it as a move into their path right now. One account says a signal left on for miles, or a car that moves half into a lane before the indicator comes on, tells the road nothing it can use. Two single accounts on the mechanics of a lane change: merge fully rather than straddling, and signal and cancel once per lane if you are crossing several. One account says accelerate slightly into a lane change rather than slowing, and one correction and one caution in these conversations warn against a piece of advice that circulated with it — steering into the next lane at a sharp angle and straightening up — because at speed that is how a car fishtails.
The two cautions in the safety line are the other half of this: a signal warns, and does not buy the space. One account says the reverse too — do not trust another car’s indicator as a promise, watch what it actually does — and the Highway Code’s next rule says the same, that an indicator on another vehicle may not have been cancelled.
Look first, then signal
Two separate conversations carry the British teaching order — mirror, signal, manoeuvre — and one exchange, two accounts to one, argues signal-first against it: the two say signal before you brake or turn, for the most warning; the one says do not indicate until you know the move is safe, or you signal a move you then cannot make and confuse others. Two accounts in another exchange say the two are not in conflict — the mirror check is a glance, and the signal still comes before the brake. One account gives the American mnemonic as signal, mirror, over the shoulder, go.
The rules this page checked put it this way. The British Highway Code says signals should be given in plenty of time, having checked that it is not misleading to signal at that moment, and cancelled after use. California and New York law both require a turn signal to be shown continuously for the last hundred feet before the turn — about thirty metres, roughly six or seven car lengths ahead of the corner. That is two jurisdictions. Where you drive, the distance or the seconds required, and the penalty for skipping it, are gaps in these conversations, and this page tells you to look yours up rather than guess.
Building the habit, and the place where it seems not to work
Two separate conversations say signal even where the road markings make the turn obvious and the law may not require it, and two more say signal on an empty road with no other car in sight, because the day you forget is the day someone is there. One account failed a driving test for signalling at the stop line instead of before it and has signalled early ever since; two accounts in one note say examiners fail people for exactly that kind of procedural slip even when the driving was safe, and two say driver education is optional in some places, which is one reason the habit is thin. One account says the habit lapses because it is not enforced — a driver is seldom stopped for it — and one says it is more dangerous than the speeding that is enforced; this page carries that as an opinion.
The argument about places where signalling early invites the gap to close is in the second question below, one account to three, and the accounts’ answer is to keep signalling and stop treating the signal as a request.
If you ride a bicycle or a motorcycle, much of these conversations was not about you, and the part that was is not carried here. If your indicators have failed, the third question is yours. And if you drive where a signal is read as weakness, the argument in the second question is yours, and it does not tell you to stop.
Common questions
My indicator has started clicking fast. Is the car broken?
Nine separate conversations say it is telling you a lamp on that side has gone out — usually a bulb, front or back — and the flasher, with less to drive, ticks faster. One prevalence note says the fast blink is a surprise to a lot of drivers until it happens to them, and one account says it is not taught in driving lessons or car manuals, which is why it feels like a mystery. The accounts’ own corrections tidy the mechanism up: on older cars the flasher is a heat-operated relay that switches faster when a lamp is missing, not a designed warning; if you have swapped the bulbs for LEDs the same thing happens because the LEDs draw so little that the circuit reads as open — two accounts say a resistor fitted in parallel cures the fast blink, and one caution says a resistor in series dims the lamp and makes it worse; one correction says LEDs do not burn out like filaments but can still fail from a voltage spike. Two accounts in one exchange say a fast blink can also be a broken wire, a jammed mechanism or a short rather than a bulb, and one account with locks cycling and buzzers changing pitch had a short somewhere in the rear, which is beyond a driveway fix. What to do: one account says check the bulbs front and rear with the lights on and off for one that is dim or dead, and one caution says the rear bulb that does brake, tail and turn in one is a likely culprit. How to tell a bad bulb from a bad flasher unit, how to trace a short, how to fit the resistor and what the parts cost are all gaps in these conversations. Ten conversations also carry the same joke, about topping up the blinker fluid — there is no such fluid, and the joke is the whole of what those ten add.
Where I drive, signalling early just makes people close the gap.
The accounts know the place you mean, and the argument is in these conversations: one exchange runs three accounts to one, across three conversations to one, with the three saying signal early because it is safer and the one saying that where they drive an early signal is an invitation to be cut off; two cautions and one account say the same about their roads. The decider the accounts give is the local driving culture, and the answer they land on is not to stop signalling but to change what you are signalling about — a signal states an intention, one account says, and is not a request for permission, so you signal, you check, and if the gap closes you wait for the next one rather than force it. One account says that people ignore an early signal and then blame you for not turning fast enough; one says drivers behind honk or overtake when the car ahead slows for a turn even at a proper distance. On following distance the accounts split too, one exchange running two accounts to one — the larger gap is safer against the driver ahead braking, the smaller one stops people diving into it — and two accounts say a very large gap invites cut-ins. How to handle a driver who cuts you off after you signalled correctly is a gap in these conversations.
My indicators do not work at all.
One account says the answer is the one the driving test still teaches — wind the window down and use arm signals, which are legal and understood — and the British Highway Code’s signals rule says an arm signal can be used to emphasise or reinforce your indicator. One caution says the whole of this page assumes a car with working signals. A car without them is a car for the garage, and that line is this page’s, not theirs. Nothing in these conversations covers how long you may legally drive with a failed indicator, so this page does not either.
Full tip: https://findangel.org/tips/signal-before-you-brake · FindAngel.org — free, always.