Hook Turn - Prevalence

Prevalence

• Melbourne, Victoria - Melbourne's Central Business District contains 19 hook turn intersections, with others scattered throughout the inner city area. Buses are permitted to make hook turns at various additional intersections such as at Hoddle Street and Victoria Parade. A few other roads have right turns or U-turns from a left-hand service lane, such as the top of St Kilda Rd and Clarendon Street South Melbourne or along Footscray Rd, North Melbourne or at the intersection of Banksia Street and Lower Heidelberg Rd, Heidelberg.
• Adelaide, South Australia - Buses are permitted to make hook turns at the intersection of King William Street and North Terrace; also at Rundle Road and Dequetteville Terrace.
• Arlington Heights, Prospect Heights and Wheeling, Illinois - Palatine Road is a heavily traveled east-west surface road with exterior one-way frontage roads and interior grade-level "express lanes", and all turns (both cross streets and driveways) are taken from the frontage roads with their own traffic signal cycle at Windsor Drive, Schoenbeck and Wheeling roads. Motorists must pay close attention to the lane usage signs as they are strictly enforced by local police (i.e. entry into the express lanes from the frontage roads prohibited at Windsor and Schoenbeck.) On Palatine Road, the hook turn lanes are separated from the through traffic by a concrete median, and have their own separate cycle of the traffic lights. Other arrangements are possible.
• São Paulo - The hook turn is not official there, but the driver can often apply it in order to achieve a quicker conversion. The alternative is the so-called little-square turn.
• China - Dotted yellow lines in certain larger intersections prohibit non-motorized vehicles as they cannot make safe and direct left turns, so their drivers have to make hook turns using the extended solid yellow lines as the stop lines.

In Beijing, Some intersections require all turns to proceed from outside lanes. In Shanghai, Many bus stops are set shortly before left turns, and road signage gives them privilege to turn left from an outside lane so as not to impede traffic flow by having to manoeuvre through multiple lanes. Also at certain junctions, especially after highway sliproads, the lanes are so marked as a holdover of the pre-merger roadways.

• Germany - Cyclists are permitted to do hook turns, as they are usually obliged to keep on the rightmost lane of the road. Bike lane and track layouts often encourage this turning behaviour. Alternatively, cyclists may change to the correct lane for turning left directly shortly before an intersection.
• Japan - Bicycles must perform hook turns when turning right. Motorbikes and mopeds with engine displacement under 50cc are required to perform hook turns when turning right from a road with three or more lanes of traffic in the same direction. Larger motorcycles and automobiles generally do not perform hook turns.
• In the Netherlands and Denmark, where segregated cycle paths are the norm, cyclists turning left are often obliged to perform what might be considered a hook turn: when the light goes green they cross the side road, but they then have to wait for the lights to change again before they can cross the road they were originally on.

In Amsterdam, there is at least one instance of a hook turn being required within a single cycle path: cycles turning left from Van Baerlestraat into Willemsparkweg are required to wait in the right-hand lane of the cyclepath for the lights to change, while those going straight on pass them on their left.

• Taiwan - In Taiwan there are some intersections where a hook turn is signed as required, but only for motorcycles under 550 cm3 and non-motorized vehicles (like bicycles); automobile traffic proceeds as usual.

• Portland, Oregon has some hook turn lanes for bicycles at some city center intersections and some obtuse angle residential intersections to give cyclists better visibility when making a left or access to a signal without having to merge into busy motorized traffic.