Street Signs I: Some of the differences in getting around.

Boston is known for crazy traffic and crazy drivers but some of that is a function of the way that Boston particularly and Massachusetts more broadly deal with traffic controls. Famously Massachusetts is the state in which Stop signs and Red Lights are optional, so they say. No one who's driven there and survived will contradict that statement either.

I first moved to Massachusetts from Connecticut in June, 1978. Connecticut had had a "right turn on red" law for several years at that point. I moved to Lynn, Massachusetts and assumed that Massachusetts was similarly enlightened. From the behavior of my fellow drivers, I saw nothing to challenge my assumption. In fact, I might have been persuaded that Massachusetts had gone one better and instituted a "left turn on red law". However, in September, 1978 I read newspaper accounts of how Massachusetts needed to pass a "right turn on red" law or lose a lot of Federal Transportation Funds. The Great and General Court (i.e. Legislature) duly passed such a law so that the Commonwealth could receive its share of Federal Funds. But the story didn't end there.

You see, the primary reason that Massachusetts hadn't a "right turn on red" law was that the Registrar of Motor Vehicles was then a Reserve General, Richard E. McLaughlin. He insisted on being referred to as "General" in his civilian capacity and, as happens fairly often in Massachusetts and probably elsewhere, he'd built up a little fiefdom at the Registry along with some personal power and influence. The General did not like "right turn on red" laws. General McLaughlin was a "conservative" in the sense that term applies to the current Administration and the U.S. Republican Party which is to say, neo-fascist. He was not going to let so petty a thing as a law, even when backed by empirical evidence that the situation mandated in the law was a major improvement on the status quo in every measurable way, get in the way of something that he knew. Thus, having procured the additional Federal Transportation Funds, the General put a sizeable chunk of that money to use by making and posting at literally every intersection in Massachusetts signs that read, "NO TURN ON RED". Law and science were discarded for General McLaughlin's faith.

So what has that got to do with Bellingham? Specifically, nothing at all. In spirit though it has a great deal to do with my new home.

One of the reasons that driving in Massachusetts and especially in Boston is so dangerous is that, unless you know where you're going, you can't get there. Yes, I know that's sort of an old New England joke, but in the Boston area, it's literally true. Things may be changing in this day of On-Star and other GPS direction systems but I rather doubt it. You see, Massachusetts does not believe in street signs much. It is possible to drive for quite a way through Boston and its suburbs, to get quite far west, south or north and out of those suburbs altogether without seeing a street sign.

No, that's an exaggeration. You will see street signs that tell you over and over the name of the street you're on but if you're looking for an address on a side street with only street names to guide you, don't even leave you home. You can't get there from wherever your starting point may be. Vainly you will search for an indication of the name of the side street. There just isn't a sign and that despite long-standing legislation that such signs must be posted. Or, in the rare event that you should find a sign identifying the name of a side street, you may still be lost. I vividly remember standing at a bus stop on Blue Hill Avenue opposite Franklin Park and noticing the street sign for the side street next to my bus stop. The sign was 2-sided with the street name on black on a white background on each side. The street name was spelled differently on each side.

In Bellingham things are far more civilized. The streets, main and side, are clearly marked. The names appear on large, visible and legible signs placed for optimum notice by drivers. The street names are spelled correctly too. But this coast has its own insanities. In Bellingham it involves street names. Takes James Street for example. It leaves downtown Bellingham running roughly parallel to and just west of Interstate Route 5 until it intersects with Sunset Drive. At the intersection with James if you make a right onto Sunset you're heading toward the Sunset Shopping Centre. You cross over I-5 and if you turn left at the second light you are entering the shopping centre parking lot. But, if you make another left just before entering the parking area in front of the Round Table Pizza chain store you are now on a street parallel to Sunset driving back in the direction you just came from. You are also on James Street again. To be fair, James does curve to the right and resume being a north-south street on the west side of the shopping centre though on the east side of I-5 now, but the point is that the street is not contiguous at all.

As I've said before, Bellingham's official history isn't anywhere near as long as that of Boston or Salem, Massachusetts but it must have had someone at some point in its past who deserved to have a street named for him or her. Or perhaps there was a large farm in one family for generations that could have given its name to that northerly portion of James Street after the shopping centre.

I have some friends here in Bellingham whose official address is on East Maryland Street despite the fact that there is no East Maryland Street where they live and never has been. Even odder, the street onto which their driveway opens does not have a name. Even if it did, that name would not be East Maryland Street because were East Maryland Street to suddenly return from the parallel dimension in which it may currently exist, it would be on the opposite side of their house.

When the county Transportation Authority here tests prospective bus drivers it gives them a series of street addresses to find in a street map book. The trick question involves an address on a major street but on a section of that street that is separated from the main course of that street by 2 or 3 miles. On the whole, many streets here are not a lot easier to find than those on the Massachusetts less-than-magical mystery tour.

Or take Bellevue, Washington, an eastern suburb of Seattle. A friend of a friend lives there and we used to visit every few months in 2003-2004. He lives in a hillside subdivision. To get to a house there you might travel up Southeast 46th Street and turn onto Southeast 46th Street Way off of which is Southeast 46th Street Court which branches into Southeast 46th Street Court Way (and parallels Southeast 46th Street Court Drive) to get to Southeast 46th Street Court Lane. For a part of the country noted for invention and innovation those qualities are notably lacking in city planners.

On the other hand if some sane person in government were to legislate an end to such madness by requiring some logic to street names and names to change when the streets are not contiguous, there would undoubtedly be an initiative petition and a hue and cry over traditions and rights that could bring down governments because the attitude both here and in Massachusetts is that what we do may be insane but that's how we do it and we're damned well going to do it that way regardless of how little sense it makes.