Ivar, hate to tell you this but if you can see Big Ben from the comfort of your car, you may be in a spot of bother. You see, “Big Ben” in the name of the bell not the clocktower. Obviously if you want to see this piece of History from the driving seat, then I think taking out fully comprehensive car insurance may be well advised.
Did anyone else see the title of this thread and picture a bunch of cars standing around masturbating (probably not).
eightpot - The Big Ben, Parliament thing was from the movie European Vacation (I think). Chevy Chase gets stuck in a traffic circle for hours.
You obviously haven’t been to Massachusetts. Upon moving here from the chicago area, I was shocked I say, SHOCKED, to come upon this ridiculous, disorganized, whirling vortex of a traffic nightmare. First, no one would let me in. Then, no one would let me out. I missed my ‘exit’ twice and by the time I got to my location I was puking from dizziness.
Sure, it SEEMS like a simple concept to yield to those within the circle. But if you operate under that principle, you’ll sit at a yield sign, waiting to begin your merry-go-round whirli-gig experiment until the second coming of the messiah. You have to have the balls to edge the nose of your beloved vehicle out into traffic and hope against hope that someone else cherishes the body shape of THEIR car, or the organization of THEIR face as much as you do. Traffic circles FORCE people to be assholes.
Haven’t the powers that be in this state ever heard of traffic lights? If you want to scare off new-comers, try breeding alligators, or making up stories about serial killers. Rotaries MUST DIE!
-L
[sub]Um, now you mention it…yeah, I did.[/sub]
Roundabouts are a blessing when properly used. Automotive ballet in action. In my town, every corner in the main business district is roundabouted; a lot of the residential streets are too. Traffic flows pretty smoothly except for the occasional twerp who can’t work out what “Give Way” means.
Preach it, sister!
Alewife and Powerderhouse Square are both on my way to work and it’s a hair-raising experience every freaking day. Morons stop in the middle to let those who should be yielding go, those who should be yielding enter without even looking to see who’s about to smash into them, and stupid pedestrians run willy-nilly through the middle of all of it. I once saw someone driving the wrong way around one once!
My cube at work overlooks the lovely Alewife rotary and when they started construction on it, I prayed they were going to replace it with traffic lights, but so far they’ve just added a few trees to make some new blind spots. All day I can hear cars honking and screeching out there, it’s a nightmare! The age of the rotary has come and gone. They may have worked well in Boston’s early days, but I assume that when two horses bumped into each other the effects were not as dramatic as a semi chopping a Geo in half.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by DeskMonkey *
**
Yep. When I started my bitching above, it was exactly Alewife I was thinking of. And about three blocks from there, there’s another one in front of that caving-in fish shack that is almost as bad (is that Powderhouse Square?). You can’t get into or out of either one of them without getting the finger from three other concerned citizens. And the worst part is that I came across them while I was lost, looking for my new apartment when I moved here. It was my first experience in this state!
Oh yeah! I forgot about that one! Powderhouse Sq. is a whole other mess. The one by the caving-in fish place has now been “fixed” so you can’t go from one side of the rotary to the other without going all the way around the other one. It truly is a fiendish masterpiece.
It’s times like this that I’m so glad I’m from Boston, where men are men and we know how to handle a rotary. It’s not that tough, people. Just dive in there knowing full well that someone going to come away with a bruised ego. It’s fun, once you figure it out.
I drove through an improvised roundabout last night. They put a big concrete circle with some stuff in it in the center of the intersection to keep people from speeding through the intersection (this was one block off of a major road, and everybody had been going around on this road and zipping through the residential neighborhood).
The road people had helpfully put up some of those signs with the picture that show that drivers are supposed to go AROUND the big concrete thing rather than straight through it. I used to think those signs were unnecessary, but now I realize they’re pointless, as another driver, heading the opposite way, stopped at the roundabout, waited for me to clear the intersection (thank god) and then TURNED LEFT, completely ignoring the roundabout, the sign, and everything they were ever told about how to drive safely, aside from what we used to call “the first rule of right-of-way” back at Interlochen: Don’t hit anything.
Oh, so YOU’RE the one I have to keep pretending I’m about to hit because you’re trying to enter the rotary when it’s not your turn. Nice to meetcha!
Howyadoin,
I got older living next to Mahoney a.k.a. Bell Circle in Revere, Mass., the biggest, baddest, rotary in America, and down the road from Broadway Circle, the scariest small rotary you’ll ever see. And ya know what?
I love them…
I love burning rubber around the corner, then suddenly making the transition onto the exit, fishtailing just a bit as I nail the throttle on the straightaway.
I love playing chicken with crunchy granola transplanted flatlander midwest wusses in their “I deserve to live more than you” fucking Volvo 240 wagons. Read my lips, fuckwad… Right. Of. Way.
I love not having to waste 5 precious minutes of a life that is already being truncated by McFood and cheap beer at some godforsaken intersection. Nobody’s coming the other way, but I’m stuck here like an asshole because someone decided it would be a good idea for me to cool my jets for a bit, right? Blow me, k? Even better, at a four-way intersection I have the special added bonus of getting T-boned by some fucking red-light-running drunken cretin who decided the rules didn’t apply to him 'cause he was late for the start of fucking WWF Smackdown.
Those of you in the Boston area, have you seen what happened since they replaced the rotary at the intersection of routes 16 and 99? Oh yeah, Big Improvement…
-Rav
(God, I love quitting smoking… It’s almost worth starting again just for the rage rush! Muahahaha!!!)
That’s some weird cross-breed of rotary and intersection. Rotarsection? Intertary? Whatever it is, it’s wrong. Now I need a freakin’ navigator to go the the shiny new Target. I don’t blame anyone but the shit-fer-brains road planners for the bad driving that goes on there.
As for waiting at a light, I’d rather do that than wait behind some geriatric nimrod who feels the need to let everyone at the STOP SIGN get into the rotary before he will continue driving through it!! And don’t even get me started on the dipshit riding a motorized scooter right on through as though he were surrounded by a force field. Although I do love the deer-in-the-headlights gaze of the cutie-pie college girls in their bitch wagons as I make no move to stop and let them into the circle of death.
Is Bell Circle the one where 1A and 60 meet? That’s the weirdest damn rotary ever. Lights, a road going through the middle, confusing forks - it’s got everything!
I used to live on Powderhouse Blvd, and I never had much trouble with Powderhouse Circle. And the problem with Alewife isn’t so much the rotary itself as all the people trying to cut across traffic to get into the mall.
What I don’t like in Boston is all the lights with the “stealth” protected left turns. If it’s a protected left, it ought to have a left arrow. Otherwise it just encourages people to think they ought to rip around the left turn as soon as the light turns green, before the oncoming traffic gets moving.
And don’t even get me started on the intersection of Curtis and Powderhouse, where you’ve got a left arrow but it isn’t a protected left.
Hehehe… you will be assimilated…
Right.
Of.
Way.
-Rav
I resemble that remark.
However, you might want to re-consider playing chicken with me in my big V12.
-L
You guys are hilarious. Who knew Boston roads could be amusing.
It seems some of you McMuffins are precisely the reason why a simple traffic circle doesn’t work coughflymastercough.
Just try to catch my turbo 4 if you can with your ecosystem destroying environmentally challenged RangeRover [guessing here], SexyWriter.
SexyWriter: What is that thing? Does it have an on-board oil refinery under the hood? I think I see Captain Joseph Hazelwood sitting in the passenger seat. Seriously, very nice… if I didn’t need my license and didn’t think street racing was recklessly immature, I’d take you up on the race offer.
Howyadoin,
I reckon I’ll give you a run…
300bhp 4.6L Northstar DOHC 32-valve all-aluminum V8, 10.3:1 compression, 0-60 in a tick over 7 sec…
Versus a 278bhp 6.0L V12 in a car that is slightly heavier. Better torque with the added cubes though
Lynnfield traffic circle, care to run some laps? Or we can just go south on Lynn Marsh Road, 180 in Broadway Circle, and back to Saugus…
-Rav
P.S. Sweet Jag…
Meet the Bad Caddy
That sure isn’t a Volvo you’re driving… Definitely a worthy adversary for a “rotary rumble” 
-Rav