Long Island Left Turn Accidents Lawyer

Left-Turn Accident Lawyers Serving All of Long Island

A left turn is the most dangerous routine thing a driver does. It means crossing a lane of traffic coming the other way, and on Long Island that lane is usually moving fast. A left into a shopping center on Hempstead Turnpike. A left off Jericho Turnpike onto a side street. A left at a light on Route 110 with three lanes of oncoming traffic to judge. The turning driver picks a gap, the gap closes, and the person coming the other way takes the hit.

If you were hit by a driver turning left, the law is on your side. New York requires a left-turning driver to yield to oncoming traffic, and failing to yield is negligence in itself. The turning driver carries the burden of explaining the crash.

Left turns were the critical event in 22.2% of all crashes in NHTSA’s national crash causation survey, published in 2010. Right turns accounted for 1.2%, nearly twenty times fewer.

Most of these collisions are intersection crashes, and our T-bone accident page covers how intersection fault gets fought in general. This page covers the left turn itself. What the statute requires, what your signal decides, the speeding defense you’ll hear in almost every one of these cases, and what happens when you were the driver turning. No-fault, the serious injury threshold, and how a case gets valued are covered on our Long Island car accident lawyer page.

Who Is at Fault in a Left-Turn Accident in New York?

The driver who turned left, in nearly every case.

Vehicle and Traffic Law § 1141 requires a driver turning left within an intersection, or into an alley, private road, or driveway, to yield the right of way to any vehicle approaching from the opposite direction that’s within the intersection or close enough to be an immediate hazard. New York courts treat a violation as negligence per se. The violation itself is the negligence, and the turning driver has to come forward with a non-negligent explanation.

The Second Department, the appellate court that decides Long Island cases, restated the rule in Goodluck v. Azeez in March 2026. The driver with the right of way “is entitled to assume that the opposing operator will yield.” In that case the court dismissed the claim against the oncoming driver entirely, because he had the right of way, the other car failed to yield, and he lacked the time to avoid the collision. A driver “who has only seconds to react to a vehicle which has failed to yield” is not comparatively negligent for failing to avoid it.

That’s the starting position for a person who was hit by a left-turning driver. The turn was a violation, you were entitled to expect it wouldn’t happen, and a few seconds of reaction time isn’t fault. Steve’s overview of how fault is assigned by crash type puts it in plain terms. The driver making the left turn is usually the one at fault, and a speeding argument against the other driver, where it holds up at all, usually reduces fault by a small portion.

Green Light, Green Arrow, Flashing Yellow Arrow

Which signal the turning driver faced decides most of the case, because each one assigns the duty to yield differently.

The row that decides the most Long Island cases is the first one. A green light is not permission to turn. It’s permission to turn when it’s safe, and turning drivers routinely treat the two as the same thing. The second most common dispute is the green arrow, where the turning driver says the arrow was on and the oncoming driver says it had ended. That’s a timing question, and the signal’s timing records answer it the same way they answer a yellow light dispute. Our red light and stop sign page covers how those records get obtained and read.

NYSDOT has been replacing the old signal heads on Long Island with flashing yellow arrows, and drivers have been confused by them since the first ones went in. The flashing arrow doesn’t change the law. It’s a reminder that the turn is unprotected, and a driver who turns on it into oncoming traffic has violated § 1141 just as if the light had been a plain green.

The Five Left Turns Behind Most Long Island Crashes

Long Island’s major roads move heavy through traffic, and most of the left turns across them are unprotected. Multiple oncoming lanes, commercial driveways every few hundred feet, and left-turn lanes that face each other across the median. These are the turns we see in our cases, and what proves each one.

The common thread is the one NHTSA found. Inadequate surveillance, meaning the driver didn’t look well enough, was the critical reason in 44.1% of intersection crashes, and a false assumption about what the other driver would do accounted for another 8.4%. Left-turn crashes are rarely mechanical failures or freak events. In most of them, the driver looked and got it wrong.

“The Other Driver Was Speeding”

This is the defense in nearly every left-turn case, and it’s the first thing the turning driver’s insurance company will say to you. They can’t argue their driver had the right of way, so they argue you were going too fast for their driver to have judged the gap.

Two things limit that argument. The first is a 2018 Court of Appeals decision, Rodriguez v. City of New York, which held that a plaintiff moving for summary judgment on liability does not have to prove freedom from comparative negligence. In a left-turn case that means we can ask the court to rule the turning driver liable as a matter of law without first winning the speed argument. If the defense wants to reduce your recovery by claiming you were speeding, that’s their burden to prove at the damages stage, and it does not stop the liability ruling.

The second is what the law expects of a driver with the right of way. You’re required to see what there is to be seen and to use reasonable care, and insurance companies lean on that duty hard. But Goodluck and the cases before it hold that a few seconds of reaction time to a car that turns across your path is not negligence. The question is whether your speed contributed to the crash, not whether you were over the limit at all.

The evidence that settles it is your own car’s data. Most vehicles record roughly five seconds of speed, braking, and throttle before a crash, and the recorder shows exactly how fast you were going and when you hit the brake. If the data shows you at or near the limit with braking before impact, the speeding defense is finished. If it shows something else, we’d rather know on day one than at a deposition. Either way, the car has to be preserved before it’s repaired, because the repair can erase the data.

If You Were the Driver Turning Left

You can still have a case, and if you were hurt, you should have it evaluated.

New York follows pure comparative negligence. A driver who shares fault for a crash recovers damages reduced by their percentage of fault, and a left-turning driver is not automatically 100% responsible. The oncoming driver who ran a red light, entered the intersection after the signal changed, or was traveling far over the limit shares the fault, and in some cases carries most of it. The turning driver’s case is harder than the oncoming driver’s, and the insurance company will treat the turn as the whole story. It isn’t always.

The facts that move fault back toward the oncoming driver are the ones that need to be found quickly. Whether the light had changed. Whether the oncoming driver’s own vehicle data shows excessive speed or no braking. Whether a witness saw the oncoming car accelerate through a stale yellow. Our red light and stop sign page covers how a signal violation by the oncoming driver gets proven.

Passengers in the turning car are in a different position. A passenger is almost never at fault, and a passenger’s claim runs against both drivers in whatever shares a jury or settlement assigns. If you were riding with the driver who turned, your claim doesn’t wait for the drivers to finish blaming each other.

How We Handle Left-Turn Cases

We move for summary judgment on liability as early as the facts support it. Rodriguez makes that motion available without first winning the speed fight, and Goodluck shows what the Second Department does with a clear failure to yield. A liability ruling before trial takes the insurance company’s main negotiating chip off the table and leaves the case about one question, what your injuries are worth.

Getting there means preserving two things immediately. Your car, before anyone repairs it, so the event data survives. And the intersection as it was, which means photographs of the signal heads, the turn lanes, the opposing turn lane, and anything that blocked a sightline, taken before the turning driver’s insurance company builds its version of the scene. The turning driver’s own data matters too, and we send a preservation demand for their vehicle before it’s fixed or sold.

How We Can Help

The insurance company already has their driver’s version

It was given within a day of the crash, and it says you were speeding. The evidence that answers it, your car’s data, the signal records, and the witnesses, is easiest to get in the first two weeks. We start there.

Get a Free Case Review

The rest of the case is built the way every serious injury case is. Treating physicians and, where the injuries call for it, medical and economic experts documenting the full impact, including future care and lost earning capacity. We handle the insurance calls, the no-fault paperwork, and the treatment authorizations so you don’t have to, and we prepare every case as if it’s going to a jury, because the carriers know which firms do that and it changes the number they offer.

What a Left-Turn Settlement Depends On

Two things. How clean the liability picture is, and what the medical evidence shows.

A left-turn case where the speeding defense has been answered with vehicle data settles like a case the insurance company expects to lose at trial. The same injuries with the speed question still open settle for less, because the carrier prices in the chance a jury assigns you a share of fault, and every percentage point comes out of your recovery. That’s why the data and the signal records get pulled before the first demand goes out, not after.

The damages side turns on whether your injuries meet New York’s serious injury threshold, how consistently they were treated, what the crash cost you in earnings, and whether any of it is permanent. Be skeptical of anyone who quotes you a number before the medical picture is complete. How case value gets evaluated across all of our cases is covered on our Long Island car accident lawyer page, and your no-fault benefits start through the policy of the car you were in regardless of fault, with the application due within 30 days. The details are on our no-fault insurance page.

Reviewed by

Steven Palermo Esq.

Senior Partner, Palermo Law, P.L.L.C.

Steven Palermo is a Long Island personal injury attorney with more than 25 years of experience representing injured victims in Nassau and Suffolk Counties. He is admitted to the New York State Bar and the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York.