Another Example Of U-turn Gone Wrong.

Taking a 70 foot long vehicle that bends in the middle and making a 3 point turn is, well... it's out of the question. U-turns are extremely dangerous, but 3 point turns are... well, the only descriptive term I can come up with is "impossible."

Only way I see it would be what I did this morning.. Turned into a business driveway.. Backed up across the street into the opposite driveway (parking lot) until I could make a slow turn.

To be clear this was at 6 in the morning in a industrial park on a Saturday.. No cars for miles

Delco Dave asks:

Question for you all! I understand true U turns are not permitted. Is a 3 point turn considered a U turn or is that an acceptable procedure to get out of a jam and turn truck around?

What do you consider a 3 point turn? Do you mean one of these?

Only if you can make it outside of a 23+ foot circle near your GOAL.

For a semi, that would mean you need to back up on a roadway, sort of like making a 90 alley dock in the middle of a street. This is very much frowned upon, so much so that you might get in more trouble with that backing up than you would with the U-turn.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. I didnt mean on a possibly busy roadway. Was thinking along the lines of what Joseph L posted. Where you have the room to pull in or reverse in somewhere and safely turn yourself around

Delco Dave that’s pretty much the only thing you can do. And unfortunately that can be a few miles down the road lol.

He definitely didn’t come out smelling like a rose after that stunt.

Backing across a roadway is often times worse in my opinion because you're backing blind. Often times if you're delivering to a warehouse/industrial area there will be other facilities that were built to accommodate trucks and you can just as easily pull in there and get turned. Otherwise many times there's a truck friendly route that would allow you to circle the block (or several) and come back the opposite direction. The best course of action is to stop immediately after you realize you goofed up and evaluate the situation. In this particular situation the driver hypothetically could have backed down the wide shoulder the couple blocks to get to the cold storage if he couldn't figure out how to get turned around. It is far from ideal but its much better than a u turn especially on a road that size.

For those starting out that don't have a Trucker GPS you can zoom in on Google maps when you're settings are set to show traffic levels. More times than not the roads it shows info for will be a main road that SHOULD accommodate your truck. HOWEVER, as always it is extremely important to pay attention to signs especially low clearance or no trucks allowed signs. This becomes much more difficult in places like Chicago and the Northeast so I suggest you "drive" the route on Google before you commit and get yourself into a bigger problem.

Oh I wouldn't have done it if it wasn't for day and hour.. Luckily I could see both ways before backing.. That's not always possible