Traffic Signal Lights and Flashing Signals

Traffic Signal Lights and Flashing Signals

Quick Answer: On Guam, 16 GCA § 3339 makes it unlawful to disobey any traffic signal unless a peace officer directs otherwise. Green lets you proceed and turn while yielding to pedestrians who started across first, yellow orders you to stop before the nearest crosswalk unless that stop cannot be made safely, and red requires a full stop with no movement until green - except that § 3339(g) allows a right turn on red after a complete stop, unless the Chief of Police has erected a sign at that intersection prohibiting it. A flashing red is a stop sign, a flashing yellow means proceed with caution, and a dead unlit signal means stop and go only when safe.

The rule that outranks every light

Before you memorize colors, memorize the override. Under 16 GCA § 3339(f), whenever a peace officer is present at an intersection or anywhere on the public highways, the officer's verbal or visible signals and instructions take precedence over any traffic sign, symbol, signal or marking, and it is unlawful to fail or refuse to comply. The Guam Driver's Handbook repeats this in its compliance section: any traffic direction signal by a traffic or police officer, or by a fireman on duty, must be obeyed even when it contradicts the light.

This produces a reliable test item. If the question puts a police officer in the intersection waving you through a red light, the correct action is to go, slowly and under the officer's direction. The officer is not overriding the law - the statute puts the officer above the hardware.

The three steady colors, as the Guam Code writes them

Three points deserve slowing down on.

Green is permission, not ownership. The statute says traffic facing a green "may proceed" - and in the same breath commands drivers to yield to pedestrians already crossing. A green light does not clear the intersection for you. The handbook states the practical version directly: regardless of the traffic signal, you must always yield the right-of-way to any pedestrians or vehicles already in the intersection.

Turn restrictions have to be posted properly. Green allows left and right turns unless official signs say otherwise, and 16 GCA § 3339(c) specifies where those signs go: signs indicating permissible turns "shall be attached to the regular traffic signals, or immediately adjacent thereto, and shall be clearly illuminated at night." A turn-restriction sign bolted to a pole 100 feet back on a side street is not doing the job the statute describes.

Yellow is where most drivers have the law backwards. Read § 3339(b)(2) literally: traffic facing yellow shall stop. Driving through is the exception, available only when the stop cannot be made in safety, and then only cautiously. Worked through:

• You are 200 feet out at 25 mph when the light turns yellow. You can stop comfortably, so the law requires you to stop.
• You are 40 feet out at 35 mph when it turns yellow. Braking hard would risk a rear-end collision, so the safety exception applies and you may proceed cautiously through.
• You accelerate on the yellow to "make it." That is not the safety exception. Nothing in § 3339 authorizes speeding up for a yellow, and if the light turns red before you enter the intersection you have violated § 3339(b)(3).

Right turn on red, and the Chief of Police power

This is one of the most heavily tested Guam-specific items, because the power to switch it off sits with one named official.

16 GCA § 3339(g): the operator of a vehicle stopped at the entrance of an intersection in obedience to a red light signal may make a right turn, but shall yield the right-of-way to pedestrians and to other traffic proceeding as directed by the signal. Then comes the twist: "except that the Chief of Police may, by regulation, prohibit any such right turn against a red light signal at any intersection, which regulation shall be effective when a sign is erected at such intersection giving notice thereof."

The statute and the handbook together impose four conditions:

1. Come to a complete stop first. A rolling right on red is not the § 3339(g) turn, because you were never "stopped in obedience to" the red.
2. Be in the extreme right-hand lane. The handbook's turning section states that the right turn is made from the extreme right-hand lane and completed in the extreme right-hand lane you are entering, unless signs or pavement markings clearly permit otherwise.
3. No posted sign prohibits it at that intersection.
4. Yield to pedestrians and to traffic moving on the green.

Two exam angles come out of the Chief of Police clause. First, the official who holds the power is the Chief of Police - not the Motor Vehicle Division, not the Director of Revenue and Taxation, not the Department of Public Works. Second, the regulation has no effect until a sign is erected at that intersection giving notice. A prohibition that exists only on paper does not bind you.

One import to resist: § 3339 authorizes a right turn against a red. The Guam Code contains no provision permitting a left turn on red from a one-way street onto another one-way street, which many mainland states allow. Do not carry that habit, or that answer, across the Pacific.

Flashing red and flashing yellow

16 GCA § 3335 gives these their own short statute, and the two are frequently swapped on tests.

• Flashing red (stop signal). Stop before entering the nearest crosswalk at the intersection, or at a limit line when one is marked, or if there is neither, before entering the intersection. Your right to proceed is then "subject to the rules applicable after making a stop at a stop sign," which pulls in the ordinary right-of-way rules.
• Flashing yellow (caution signal). You may proceed through the intersection or past the signal only with caution. No stop is required.

The trap is false symmetry. Flashing red is not "yield," and flashing yellow is not "stop." A flashing red is legally identical to a stop sign; a flashing yellow is a warning that cross traffic is not being controlled the way you might assume.

Dark signals: Guam's power-outage rule

Typhoons and outages knock signals out on Guam often enough that the Legislature wrote the answer into statute. Under 16 GCA § 3339(h), a driver approaching an intersection whose official traffic control signals are inoperative shall stop at the intersection, and may proceed with caution when it is safe to do so. When two or more vehicles reach the intersection from different highways at the same time and the signal is dead, all of them stop, and the right to proceed follows stop-sign rules. The same subsection directs the Department of Public Works to install a sign at each intersection reading: STOP when traffic signal light is not working. Yield to Right of Way.

So a dark signal on Guam behaves as an all-way stop - not a yield, and not "proceed if it looks clear." Guam also runs an unusual companion program under § 3345, the Adopt-A-Traffic Signal law, which lets the Department of Public Works and the Guam Power Authority accept a private business or corporation's offer to supply backup generation for a signal that goes dead during outages.

Hagåtña's famous "Loop"

The handbook devotes its own diagram to the intersection of Route 1 (Marine Corps Drive) and Route 4 in Hagåtña, with a single instruction printed beneath it: traffic may flow only in the direction of the arrows. Treat the Loop as a one-way circulation. Entering against the arrows is a wrong-way movement, and you cannot fix a missed exit by backing up or turning around inside it - you go around again. Local-knowledge items like this appear on the Guam written test precisely because they are in no mainland manual.

Emergency vehicles

16 GCA § 3339(d) exempts police vehicles in actual chase or apprehension, fire department and fire patrol vehicles responding to an alarm, and ambulances traveling in emergencies from the signal rules. The same subsection is careful to add that the exemption does not protect those drivers from the consequences of a reckless disregard for the safety of others.