For a normal car in a normal intersection, I think it’s just poor driving skill. These people don’t wait until they’re far enough into the intersection to make the turn without hitting the curb with the rear wheel, so they make up for that by shooting to the left as you describe.
On narrow streets with tightly radiused corners “going wide” seems the most reasonable method to take a right turn. For those of us who have driven many cars and trucks without power steering “going wide” just comes natural.
When you ride a motorcycle on a race track you learn how to read a corner. Most drivers start a turn too early have to let up a bit mid turn and then turn the wheel more at the end to finish the turn. This is a deadly practice on a motorcycle, so you learn to read a turn enter it and maintain the same radius throughout the turn to the end.
On left turns you see driver’s doing the same thing only here they clip the middle of the turn and come too close to cars waiting to turn or go over the white lines marking the center of the road.
A proper set up for a right turn would be to set up for the turn in the left side of right lane about 50 to 100’ before the turn, slow down to the appropriate speed, wait until the front wheels have entered the intersection then turn the wheel so you end up on the left side of the right lane of the street you are turning into. Weaving means misreading the turn and indicates a flaw in the technique.
Now if you are driving a semi- all bets are off. How the truckers manage those monsters on tight streets is just amazing.
Simply poor driving practice. Professional drivers driving long vehicles will move to the edge of the lane that gives them the outside arc, in order to allow their rear wheels room to cut the inside arc, ahead of time and in preparation for the turn. Bad drivers are the only ones that suddenly swing back and forth across the lane line.
Tractor trailer drivers will often find it necessary to swing wide and use both lanes to make a tight turn, but when they do they make every effort to make what they’re doing obvious to motorists well ahead of the actual turn, and in fact will try to make it impossible for motorists behind them to mistake their intentions and try to swing around them on the bad side. Like every population, they have a few “bad apples”, but generally they’re the most “far thinking” and considerate drivers on the road.
There is an intersection in Cordoba with a Stop-on-red line back the width of the adjacent gas station, maybe 5 or 6 car lengths. I assume there are big trucks with drive through that intersection.
Of course, maybe I miss the point and it’s actually to let cars exit the gas station with a line of cars waiting at the light.
*** Tractor trailer drivers will often find it necessary to swing wide and ***
Yes and it is not only smart to give them all the room you can, but it makes you safer.I usually ‘apex the turn’ on my motorcycle, staying within my lane of course, mostly because it’s fun.
Also, as a bonus, it probably pisses off the only person on the entire planet who knows how to drive.
Back in the '60s when I first started driving, I was driving behind a friend’s grandmother, who I knew very well and she did that and as we approached a right hand turn, she would drive a bit to the left and then swing wide to the right around the corner.
Since I knew her well and her baking skills (she made wonderful chocolate cookies that she would purposely put two of them too close together so they came out as a double cookie), I stopped by to gab and ask her about this.
She said it was something her husband wanted her to do so she would not clip the corner of the curb and damage the white walls on the tires… Her answer made sense so I ate another cookie…
Almost everything makes sense with good cookies. 
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A moment of silence for those members who are no longer with us.
Farmers do this out of habit. They think they are pulling a trailer.
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Simple. They’re bad drivers. I’ve seen some go so far as to go over the line into the next lane.
Does not make a lot of sense to reply to someone who made a one and done post 14 years ago.
I’m guilty of some of the above, and to be honest, I didn’t have these issues in my 1996 Ford Contour, 1981 Buick Century midsize, or other pre-2000s cars I’ve driven.
My theory, and it’s just that: Although vehicle sizes have crept up since the later rounds of downsizing in the 1980s, something less noticeable has occurred with vehicle design:
Windows have become increasingly smaller, especially in the vertical direction. This is true mainly of the side windows and the rear. It’s much harder to see ‘down & around’ in a post-2000s model year anything! Be it a SUV, ordinary sedan, whatever.
I’m currently 5’7”, medium build, I say currently because 35 years ago in college I stood exactly 5’8”. I find that, on cars with the ability to elevate the driver seat, powered or manual, I have to raise it nearly all the way up to obtain the same downward view out of a recent model that I could easiy obtain with the factory seat height in the Ford or Buick I referred to above.
The belt-line(door sill height) is noticeably higher in newer vehicles, relative to the seated position, than it was in cars from the 2000s or earlier.
I understand that there are allegedly safety and aesthetic reasons for this trend, but they make the number one safety feature of any car - a clear view out all sides - difficult, unless one is over 6 feet tall or has a large torso.
Secondly, and I know I’ll take further flack for bringing it up: Wider tires on larger diameter wheels, as yxes as they may appear to some, even inflated according to vehichle mfgr. specs, simply do not connect me to the road as well as relatively narrower, higher profile tires on smaller rims did. (Could the current use of electric power assist steering also play a role?)
I felt that my 10 year old Buick Century, with 30,000 miles on it at the time, had a more on-center feel, once aligned and tire pressures set. Steering was still light, but that was due more to Buick designers wanting their target audience to have relatively effort-free steering, so they put in a higher pressure pump.
A friend in high school, when seeing someone move left then turn right, said they must have been from Florida (where my friend was from), where they learned to ‘swing left then turn right’ in driver’s ed. No idea if it was true.
There are probably as many such anecdotes as there are on-road instructors.
I guess I don’t have a problem with this if they stay completely in their lane. But I did see an SUV the other day in front of me swerve far enough left he was a couple of feet in the lane to his left. I was just thinking “sloppy driver”.
Either I never paid attention, or it is not an issue in my part of the world, I just don’t remember seeing anyone or rarely anyone going left before turning right unless pulling a trailer… I do however see drivers curbing while turning right a lot…
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I see it around here all too often. And one time it caused an accident. Driver turning right first pulled left (into the other lane going the same direction as he/she was) and the car clipped the front end.
I’m having a hard time visualizing this (alcohol and nicotine were bad on my infant brain, but someone else was consuming them at the time!).
Describe what happened, using ‘Driver A’ as the right-hand turner and other subsequent drivers as ‘B’, etc.
Maybe it is because most of our roads are wider with large turns, most of our neighborhoods outside of Davidson county (Nashville) were built in the mid to late 60’s or later and you can park a vehicle on both sides of the street and still have room to drive between the vehicles…
Just a thought on why, no proof…
Here is our old neighborhood, on 1/2 acre lots for reference, houses are mostly 1,500 sq ft…
