No Left Turns At Night (10pm-6am)

[tman]

I saw an interesting sign in Omaha recently - it's a pretty standard intersection at 42nd and Ames, with no left turn lanes for Ames Ave traffic (four lanes, quite busy). It'd probably be a fair place to prohibit left turns all the time, or at least prohibit them except later at night (both much more common).

The strange thing is that the signs actually just prohibit left turns from 10pm-6am, ostensibly the least busy time of day. Any thoughts on why they might've done this here? I haven't seen it elsewhere in the city, even nearby.

StreetView

[Max Rockatansky]

Likely as a measure to mitigate/deter car cruises and side shows.  Fresno used to do the same thing on Kings Canyon Road.

[tman]

Interesting, that'd make sense.

The city's approach has been to post white "No Cruising" signs which were found in a couple cases - most famously along Dodge St, which is the main street at the midline of town. Dodge was a popular cruising strip in the 80s. These were put up in the early 90s and came down a while ago.

There's still some signs up in a different part of town, at the area to the south and west of downtown on Park Ave/Leavenworth St, but those initially went up in response to different sorts of illegal activity (and supposedly went up around 2000).

https://nebraskapublicmedia.org/en/news/news-articles/omahas-no-cruising-signs-a-rarely-enforced-relic-of-a-teenage-pastime/