Inventor Thinks One Good U-Turn Deserves a Signal
Dennis Strawn has an idea that he thinks could make life on the road safer.
It came to him after he nearly rear-ended a car in his hometown of Laguna Niguel. The 50-year-old banker was preparing to turn left when the car in front of him in the left-turn lane unexpectedly made a U-turn. If he hadn’t been paying close attention, Strawn says, he’d have plowed right into the guy.
“I had to put my brakes on,” Strawn recalls. “There was no accident but I thought, ‘Gosh, there was no way for me to know they were making a U-turn.’ ”
He spent several months thinking about the problem and sketching designs in a notebook. What he came up with was the “U-turn signal.” Strawn has patented the design and is attempting to persuade legislators and safety experts--many of whom are skeptical--that it ought to be required in new cars.
“Once I had the experience,” Strawn says, “I thought of the need. It took me a while to work out all the kinks--the big thing was the aesthetics.”
He solved that problem by incorporating the U-turn signal into the existing blinker assembly already required in cars. Why not, Strawn reasoned, add an extra U-turn light--he suggests green--next to the blinkers on the front and rear left-hand sides of a car? If the driver intends to turn left, he pulls down the turn-signal lever as now is the case. If he wants to make a U-turn, however, he pulls it one notch further, activating the flashing front-and-rear U-turn signal lights.
Strawn says the system could be added to new cars for about $100 per vehicle. “It would be aesthetically pleasing yet communicate the required information to other drivers,” he said. “The way to do this is to go to the lawmakers and get them to make it mandatory.”
A spokesman for Rep. Ronald C. Packard (R-Oceanside), whose office Strawn contacted with the design, said that he plans to forward it to the U.S. Department of Transportation. “The information he sent to us certainly looks worthy enough to pass on to the people who deal with this kind of thing,” Adam Schwartz said.
Kyle Johnson, a spokesman for General Motors, agreed. “It sounds like something that would be feasible,” he said. “It ought to be looked at and assessed.”
But a safety expert for the transportation department’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which must approve new-car requirements, says that this one may never happen. The last time the government mandated changes in specifications for car lights, said Michael Perel, was in 1986 when it required new cars to have rear-window brake lights. That happened after a decade of study. No one has been seriously studying U-turn-related automobile accidents, Perel said, because relatively few occur.
“You would need some proof that it [Strawn’s device] has some benefits,” Perel said.
Even if there were a need, he said, it would take a long time for drivers to learn to recognize the new signal. “No one is going to know what it is without a major education campaign,” Perel said. “It would be nice if we could snap our fingers and educate people, but that’s just not going to happen.”
Strawn remains undaunted by such criticisms. A single man who works as a project manager for a Long Beach bank, he has lots of time to devote to the project. With a partner, he has formed a company to push for the U-turn signal requirements and, eventually, license manufacturers to produce them.
“If this goes through it will make me rich,” the inventor said.
He hasn’t entirely lost touch with reality, however. “I’ll keep my day job until one of those big checks comes in,” Strawn says.
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Street Smart appears Mondays in The Times Orange County Edition. Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about traffic, commuting and what makes it difficult to get around in Orange County. Include simple sketches if helpful. Letters may be published in upcoming columns. Please write to David Haldane, c/o Street Smart, The Times Orange County Edition, P.O. Box 2008, Costa Mesa, CA 92626, send faxes to (714) 966-7711 or e-mail him at david.haldane@latimes.com. Include your full name, address and day and evening phone numbers. Letters may be edited, and no anonymous letters will be accepted.
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A Good Turn
Dennis Strawn of Laguna Niguel has invented a U-turn signal. It consists of a flashing green light mounted next to the blinker on a car’s left front and rear ends.
