In Connecticut, where I learned to drive, there are intersections. The intersections have stop signs, traffic lights or some other means of indicating a need for caution by those proceeding through the space. Intersections are pretty straight-forward. You enter one and either turn or don't. It's natural in a sense because you handle them in an automobile just as you would if you were on foot except that you have to be extra cautious because, while some bruiser might jostle you when on foot, it's far less serious than being run into by a ton or two of steel, fiberglass and plastic. In any case, from early childhood we understand intersections.
That, of course, is not to say that intersections don't present some confusion. Even in very ancient times our ancestors recognized that intersections were someplace else. Hangings were customarily carried out at intersections such as crossroads and public squares. Truly scary people such as witches and those likely to become ghouls or vampires were buried at intersections. The object of those uses of intersections was confusion, specifically for the angry ghost or revenant. Those who carried out the hanging didn't want the ghost to have an easy time of finding them. Similarly, the ghoul or vampire might choose the wrong road out of the intersection and end up feeding on the bodies or blood of some folks utterly innocent of the offense that drove the revenant. That's Schadenfreude of a very special level. Also, intersections were seen as someplace else in the sense that they were not entirely one place or entirely another. They were not rightly a part of any place or world or even time. Which puts a rather large exclamation point to the fact that intersections are inherently confusing but still on a level that is familiar and minimally distressing.
In Massachusetts one commonly runs into an exponentially higher degree of confusion because Massachusetts roads frequently substitute a rotary (otherwise known by the Britishism, "roundabout") for the rather straight-forward intersection. In the still rather unhurried times of early car-culture, from the 1920s into the 1950s, rotaries probably made some sense, especially in intersections where more than 2 roads cross. In those days, rotaries had rules just as intersections do. Actually, rotaries still have rules but we seem to be hardwired with the knowledge that they are someplace else and not entirely of this world so, once in one, people drive like homicidal maniacs to whom no rules apply.
When entering a rotary one is supposed to yield to traffic that is already in the rotary. It sounds like a perfectly logical rule until you have to give it a practical application. Let me cite the example of the rotary at the south end of the Lynn Marsh Road in Revere, Massachsetts. It is the intersection of Routes 60 and 107. The rotary probably covers more that an acre and, seen from the point of view of a map, it looks pretty straight-forward: a north-south road in and an east-west road out. Nothing complicated. Except... Not included in that simplified version are the 3 gas stations, 2 restaurants and a motorcycle sales shop that have their access off the rotary. Also not included is the fact that one of those gas stations is also an auto body shop with its own small junk yard (i.e. an automotive recycling facility if you listen to Car Talk on NPR) and that from its parking lot runs a road that ostensibly accesses a couple of houses built on the verge of the marsh but is the primary access for Revere-based mobsters to one of their body dump sites.
Also, the rotary has at least 2 concentric lanes. I say "at least" because the lane dividing lines have long been obliterated. Clearly no highway crew is insane enough to enter that rotary and attempt to repaint the lines. Also, the number of lanes depends on the size and number of cars attempting to assert a right to a lane. I've seen a couple of 1970's Lincoln Continentals and a Datsun (Nissan for you young 'uns) nervously pretending that the rotary contains 3 lanes. Oh, and did I mention that Routes 107 and 60 are truck routes or that there is a large shopping centre less than a mile to the west along Route 60 or that a little farther west Route 60 is the access to Route 1/I-95 going north-south?
Should you have the luck to find an opening in traffic that allows you into this rotary, say from American Legion Highway to the southeast, and wish to proceed across the rotary along Route 60 you might think that simply staying in the outer lane would allow you to negotiate the maneuver easily. You would be completely wrong, but you might assume that if you'd never been there before. So now, with that false assumption planted firmly in some presumedly rational part of your brain you proceed to try it. But you've barely gotten into the intersection when some lunatic pulls out of the gas station/auto body shop on your right almost destroying the passenger side of your car. While you're still flustered from that near-collision a semi, barreling down from the General Electric plant in Lynn just a few miles to the north, not only cuts you off at the merge with Route 107 but forces you into the inner lane. Since the turn out for Route 60 west comes up before the trailer on this truck is fully into the rotary, you're forced to make another circuit. If the rational part of your brain is still even partly functional you probably figure that it's a waste of gas, but not a big deal. Again, that comforting thought is simply wrong, but hold to it because your rationality is going to abandon you very soon and retaining some semblance of rationality for as long as you can is probably good for your long-term survival.
As you complete the circuit of the rotary you may try to get into the outside lane in preparation for getting out onto Route 60 west the next time it comes up. You probably will get out to the right as you pass the southerly entrance to Route 107 but you're likely to be cut off again by drivers who've never gotten over the mania induced in previous encounters with this rotary and who are coming in from the east or north or one of the 2 gas stations. If you do get into the right lane you might notice an AMC Gremlin to your left. It's a beater, a clunker. The paint is largely gone. It's turned a rust-red color. It burns oil. The driver has long, wild, greying hair and a bushy, unkempt beard. If he turns toward you, you might see the wild yet vacant stare and look of terror and madness in his eyes. This isn't a hippie. He's a formerly clean-cut kid who bought the Gremlin, new, decades ago as his first car. Two weeks later he headed for the Revere Drive-in (long gone years ago), got stuck in the rotary and has been there ever since. he is what you might become if your rational brain continues to function.
About your second or third circuit of the rotary, depending on how even-tempered you are by nature, your rational mind will turn off completely. You will become a feral driver for whom there are no traffic laws, for whom no maneuver is too dangerous not even the ones that you know end badly in Steven Segal or Bruce Willis movies. You have become the homicidal maniac I write of. You will force other drivers into guardrails without any pangs of conscience, cut others off in an irrational fury and only thereby will you ever get out of the rotary to the relative calm and safety of Route 60 west. Once there your rational brain may resume functioning but the trauma of the rotary will remain.
All it takes is one such homicidal maniac to infect all who enter the rotary. The first demon-possessed driver in the rotary behaves so badly that all the rest of those in the rotary, regardless of the wisdom and unflappability of the angels that usually guard them, instantly behave like homicidal maniacs too as a means of self-preservation. The rotary thus becomes the homicidal maniac's version of a merry-go-round.
Bellingham, Washington decided that it should have rotaries a couple of years back. Who exactly came up with this plan, I don't know, but obviously there is a homicidal maniac loose in the traffic department. Before you dismiss that suggestion as hyperbole, consider the Bellingham parking division. From all accounts there must have been a secret program that relocated some of the most vicious Nazis to Bellingham after World War II where they found employment in the parking division, an agency in which they have maintained hereditary positions ever since. There is ample though anecdotal proof of that Nazi-relocation program. No, the presence of a homicidal maniac in traffic planning isn't as far-fetched as it sounds.
For the last couple of years Bellingham has taken huge heaps of taxpayers' money, dug holes in Cordata Parkway and dumped it in. They have the paved the location of those monetary sinkholes over in the form of a rotary. Currently there are 2 rotaries, one each at the intersections of Cordata Parkway and Kellogg Road and Westerly Road. Currently they are relatively sedate affairs but a huge subdivision is nearly finished at the north end of Cordata Parkway and every field along the road is either available for or under development. And besides the rotary at Kellogg and Cordata is right next to Whatcom Community College. All the ingredients for a west coast version of the Revere rotary are in place or will be within a few years. All it needs is the yeast of time.
Had the maniac in the Bellingham traffic department troubled to do some research he or she (I'm just being egalitarian and polite. We all know that only a "guy" would think that something as unmitigatedly dumb as a rotary would be a good idea.) would have discovered that Massachusetts has been actively removing rotaries throughout the state since the late 1960s. Rotaries are magnets for collisions and auto fatalities to the extent that there is no question that the rotary is the cause of those problems rather than just the locus. I know that it's really the drivers who cause the accidents but the rotary affords those bad drivers more opportunities for destruction, mayhem and murder. And all this was true in in a world that did not have cell phones to increase the horror geometrically.
The end of this is that in a decade or so Bellingham will have to appropriate more taxpayer money to remove the rotaries that it has installed at great expense. Perhaps this is an intentional plan to provide income to various contributers to some city or county officials, but I prefer to apply Occam's Razor: Do not ascribe to conspiracy what can adequately be explained by simple stupidity...or, in this case a homicidal maniac.
More about cell phones later.
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