Signal before you brake

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. People 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

Many people 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 person 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 person 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 person 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 person says it matters most in front of a lorry, which cannot stop the way you can.

One person warns 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. Many people across the notes 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 some people say people who passed a test doing it right stopped doing it afterwards. This page is not one of the people who call that stupidity; one person says the tone of how do you not know this teaches nothing, and the page agrees.

What the signal is for

Some discussions 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 person puts it as intention, not permission — you are informing, not asking — and one person 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 person says a late or vague signal frightens people, because they read it as a move into their path right now. One person 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. Individual people 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 person says accelerate slightly into a lane change rather than slowing, and some people 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 warnings in the safety line are the other half of this: a signal warns, and does not buy the space. One person 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

Some people carry the British teaching order — mirror, signal, manoeuvre — and people argue signal-first against it: some people say signal before you brake or turn, for the most warning; one person says do not indicate until you know the move is safe, or you signal a move you then cannot make and confuse others. Some people say the two are not in conflict — the mirror check is a glance, and the signal still comes before the brake. One person 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 not covered here, and this page tells you to look yours up rather than guess.

Building the habit, and the place where it seems not to work

Some people say signal even where the road markings make the turn obvious and the law may not require it, and others say signal on an empty road with no other car in sight, because the day you forget is the day someone is there. One person failed a driving test for signalling at the stop line instead of before it and has signalled early ever since; some people say examiners fail people for exactly that kind of procedural slip even when the driving was safe, and some say driver education is optional in some places, which is one reason the habit is thin. One person 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, and people’s answer is to keep signalling and stop treating the signal as a request.

If you ride a bicycle or a motorcycle, much of the discussion 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.