You stopped at the red light and still lost the moral ledger — welcome to insurance math

You sit at a red, someone runs it and T-bones you while you’re turning left, and the insurer emails back: “We’ll call it 50/50.” That is not a judgment; it is a policy shortcut with better bookkeeping than ethics. (As the OP put it: “my wife was turning left, so regardless of right of way, she’s deemed equally at fault.”) It reads like being told you’re half-responsible for a stranger’s decision to walk into your living room.

Toy model: Driver A wants a clean record; Insurer wants a cheap, fast resolution and a single, administrable rule. Constraint: courts are slow, evidence is messy, and clients dislike legal bills. Solution: invent a bright-line rule that assigns blame symmetrically whenever a left turn is involved. Call it the “Left-Turn Parity Doctrine” — elegant, administrable, and morally unsatisfying.

(Internal memo, paraphrased) Clause 7.4: “If Vehicle X is executing a permissive left turn and Vehicle Y violates a traffic signal, both parties shall be considered equally at fault for the purposes of claim allocation because expedience beats nuance.” It’s not a verdict on who is a worse driver; it’s an accounting decision that minimizes checks, calls, and litigation.

Result: you don’t get a clean-driving-letter, you get a split-fault entry and a polite bureaucratic shrug. Which is why one Redditor’s takeaway—“Dash cams are a necessity now”—is less paranoia and more hedging: capture the evidence, force the algebra to meet reality. Efficient? Yes, in the precise, sobering sense of “efficient for the insurer’s ledger and not for your sense of justice.” Buy a camera; file this under: rules that solve administrative problems by leaning on shared inconvenience.