Abstract This study is motivated by experiments on Tore Supra and WEST tokamaks where a deepening of the E × B velocity—governed by the radial electric field E_r —near the edge is observed when the safety factor decreases in L-mode plasmas. Flux-driven global simulations of ion temperature gradient turbulence recover qualitatively the trend observed in the experiments, i.e. the E × B velocity increases when decreasing the safety factor. From these simulations, multiple clues point out the role of turbulence in the establishment of the radial electric field even though the turbulent intensity increases with the safety factor. The proposed mechanism to elucidate this phenomenon, backed up by a reduced model, is that the damping of the poloidal flow, governed by the neoclassical friction, increases more strongly with the safety factor than the turbulent drive for E_r , due to the ( r , θ ) component of the Reynolds stress.