Saratoga News

Council finally catches up with 'no right turn on red'

By Sarah Lombardo

Better late than never, the Saratoga City Council passed a resolution March 18 to prohibit right turns against red lights at the Saratoga Avenue/Highway 85 interchange. The resolution states that vehicles traveling southeast on Saratoga Avenue and turning right onto northbound Highway 85 cannot turn right against a red light between the hours of 7 a.m. and 9 a.m., Mondays through Fridays. Cars traveling the opposite direction cannot turn against a red light from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays.

Although signs were installed years ago to prohibit the turns, the issue never went before the council--until now.

"The city is supposed to have adopted a resolution, in effect, memorializing the law," City Manager Larry Perlin said. According to Perlin, city governments routinely adopt resolutions when a new "rule of the road" is passed.

"This was one that got overlooked at the time the signs got installed," he said.

Perlin said he believes the mistake occurred during the confusion over who was supposed to install the signs notifying drivers of the rule. Perlin said Caltrans was originally expected to install signs prohibiting right turns against red lights, but Caltrans officials said they didn't think the intersection was troublesome enough to warrant the prohibition.

The city asked Caltrans to look again. Caltrans changed its mind, and the signs were prepared.

"We waited and waited, and the signs never got put in, so we just put them in ourselves," Perlin said.

But why the resolution a few years after the fact?

"It's a technicality, and the traffic court could dismiss a ticket based on that," Perlin said of the city's lack of official action on the matter.

And dismissed tickets mean a possibility of missed revenue for the city from traffic fines.

But Perlin added that to the city's knowledge, no tickets had been dismissed based on that technicality.

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