How many traffic area crossings are there at this intersection?

Explanation

Two carriageway intersections.

When the road you are meeting has a central dividing strip, each of its carriageways is counted separately. On the right of the picture, a green kerbed grass strip runs down the middle of the crossing road, dividing the carriageway into two independent halves. So your road meets two separate carriageways, and the number of carriageway intersections at this junction is two.

What misleads is the double solid line in the middle of the road ahead. Markings — however bold and however doubled — do not divide a carriageway; they merely forbid crossing them. A real division occurs when a physical element such as a green strip, a refuge or a central barrier separates the two halves. That difference is the criterion for counting.

This count has a practical consequence. An intersection begins at the first carriageway edge and continues to the last; that is, when you have crossed the first carriageway and stopped in the gap between the two halves, you are still inside the intersection. Stopping in that gap, entering without enough space to clear the whole junction, and half-made decisions are exactly the behaviour that produces side impacts at wide intersections. So before entering, make sure you have somewhere to exit from both carriageways.

• "One" is correct when the crossing road has a single undivided carriageway; here the green dividing strip on the right of the picture has split it into two independent carriageways.

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