Driving in Boston 2

(This is part 2 of a roast of the Boston driver. Click here for part 1.)

Sign for a rotary in Jamaica Plain. © 2007 "Kingdafy" on flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The situation is exacerbated at rotaries. For those of you who may not be familiar with the Boston rotary, it is a complex, multilateral intersecting way, with no stop signs, at which everyone goes at the same time, and the biggest vehicle always wins. This is why so many Boston drivers, especially those from the suburbs, drive SUV’s.

A rotary usually has three to five entrances, and up to 30 exits, depending on how many times you go around before getting dizzy. This is usually only a problem for out-of-towners, who get on a rotary and then frequently get lost. So they go around and around and around, always looking for the right exit to take, but never finding it. I once heard of a man from Nebraska who couldn’t find his way off a Boston rotary and continued driving around it until he grew old and died.

Then there are traffic signals. You know, those multicolored lights posted or hanging near an intersection. To the Boston driver, the green light, as elsewhere, means “go.” The yellow light means, “You’d better speed up, or you might not get to ride in the ambulance.” And the red light means “I bet you wish you had gotten here first! Ha!” This is why, during rush hour, cars will pileup, backed up through red lights, blocking traffic going in the transverse direction, causing those streams of cars also to pileup, and so forth, in a gridlock pattern. In Boston, this is called “getting through the intersection.”

That’s a kind of intentional pileup. There are also plenty of accidental pileups, especially on the interstate. These happen usually during rush hour, when half the drivers are late, late, for a very important date.

Now, as you know, you should leave at minimum a gap of at least five car-lengths between you and the car in front of you, at least when you’re going the speed limit of 55 MPH on the highway. Of course, on the highway, only the very old or the very slow are going “only” 55. The rest of us are doing 70, 80, or even faster. And when you’re late, you can’t leave a gap in front of you, for two reasons. Firstly, this might cause the guy in front of you to slow down, because as you know, riding his tail pressures him to hurry up. (Conversely, leaving a space will remove the pressure, thereby allowing him to slow down.) Secondly, and more importantly, if you leave a space in front of you, some other more astute driver might pull into that space, thereby getting in front of you, which is a prospect almost too horrific even to mention.

Of course, the driver in front of you is thinking the same thing, and the driver in front of him, and in front of him. And at the front of this line, 10 cars in front of you, there’s some poor lady just trying to get to her lonely office job in one piece. Unfortunately, she foolishly left a space in front of her. Along comes a more astute driver, who with shrewdness and cunning cuts her off going 85 MPH, and then promptly slams on his breaks.

And that’s how we make a 10-car pileup.

Accidental pileups are not confined to the highway, of course. When I was but a teenage lad, one of my cohorts told me of an accident that he had witnessed. (And this is actually true.) A car had stopped to make a left turn onto a side street. The car behind him stopped. The next car behind also stopped. The lady in the next car after that, unfortunately, was drinking a cup of hot coffee. She reportedly got out of the car, drenched and burnt and ready to sue the guy at the front, who had “stopped short.”

On the other hand, maybe she had a point. There seem to be two kinds of Boston drivers: Those who need to move, fast, now! And those who are afraid of running into invisible objects and small animals. She was clearly of the former type, and maybe the other guy was of the latter.

To the latter I say: It is possible—quite easy, in fact—to make a right turn without running into the curb. You do not need to be afraid of this phobia. You do not need to swing out 6 feet from the curb, come to a complete stop in the middle of the road, and then inch your way around the turn. Trust me: even if you were to drive like a normal person, you still wouldn’t run into anything. (Spoilsport.) And you should also know that slowing down to 15 MPH while merging onto the highway, when everyone else is zooming by you going 70… That can actually make it more likely you’ll get hit.

Of course, the other type of driver is not much better, the kind of driver who has to get ahead at any cost, to whom even a $150 speeding ticket is “way too slow.” To them I say: See, here! My I do not have to go faster than 85 in a 55-MPH zone, just because you’re late for an appointment. My pending fatal accidents are not dictated by your poor planning. I’m quite capable of instigating my own accidents, thank you very much. After all, I am a Boston driver.

See? I even have the license to prove it!

-TimK