October 15, 2006


rotary.jpg My commute home is marred by having to go through this amazingly annoying rotary. Massachusetts traffic engineers seem to love rotaries for some reason, despite the fact that they cause traffic patterns indistinguishable from figure-eight racing, which is a motor sport designed to cause aggressive racers to T-bone one another as spectacularly as possible. This particular rotary tends to be crowded three-wide with cars and SUV's, moving at either zero or twenty miles per hour, vascillating between the two moment to moment. Everyone uses their turn signals to different purposes—does the right blinker mean that I'm in the left lane coming in from the north and that I'm planning on getting immediately into the left lane heading west? (Yes.) Does the left blinker mean that I'm in the right lane coming in from the east and that I'm informing you that I'm about to cut in front of you momentarily so that I can continue south, or that I'm about to cut in front of you and sit, blocking your exit to the north, so that I can get in line to go east? (Neither, in my case.) Once I go east, do you think I'll bother to turn off my signal before turning north (right) or south (left)? (Yes, in my case, but I'm in the minority, so it probably confuses people.) The Onion reveals that this is probably an intentional design feature, and would explain a lot about road layout in eastern Mass.
[permalink ]

©2001-2007 Josh Daghlian, All Rights Reserved.