If two wrongs don’t make a right, but three lefts do, does that make rotaries not just right, but in fact a spiraling computer proof of god’s own intentions, a coiling helix encoded with his plan for us? Maybe elsewhere, but not here in Vermont.
Rotaries, excuse me, “roundabouts,” have been getting a bad rap lately because they don’t work and they keep sprouting up everywhere, like spores on wet logs or box-stores in hayfields. And, the fact is: Rotaries don’t work—in Vermont.
But they do work everywhere else. Why?
Simple: Vermonters. Vermonters don’t like rotaries. Excuse me, roundabouts.
We’ll get back to Woodchucks and their straightforward tendencies in a moment, but first, let’s examine that race to our south that loves rotaries: Flatlanders.
In a fabled land called Massachusetts, (don’t let the Indian name fool you, it’s kinda overbuilt) the rotary is neither feared nor reviled, impressive when you consider the decades the average Baystater spends waiting at rotaries. Maybe it’s all the time sitting at a standstill, staring into the swirling eye of the rotary’s storm, awaiting their moment to enter the fray that instills in the Flatlander an understanding of the whirling wall of metal and the secrets of its gaps and wormholes. Like an old sea-salt knows wind by its smells and sounds, so to do flatlanders know rotaries.
In Mass rules have evolved into laws written in the guardrails’ dents, in the rubber tire-streaks on the medians, in the piles of shards of plastic and glass, in the heaps of cigarettes and in the metal detritus wrested by justice from cars driven by the timid or meek. The laws have been tried by time and found to be valid.
Laws of the Massachusetts Rotary # 1. (there is only one) Thou shalt not squander a hole in the traffic flow; when it’s your turn to go, go. That’s it. Go. There exists an alternate to this: When it’s your turn to go, go, and if it’s not your turn, but you’ve been waiting a wicked long time, go anyway and look the other way when you do. But, this alternate law only applies in snowstorms, Cape traffic, on Easter Sunday, or within one hundred miles of Boston, Connecticut, Vermont or New Hampshire.
The reprisal for breaking this commandment is immediate and severe. No Baystater forgets the first time two hundred car-horns call out to the heavens in unison, proclaiming them to be an idiot, and as the rookie or out-of-stater sits, waiting for the next possible hole in traffic flow, they think two things. First, they notice that two hundred car horns achieve a nearly perfect harmony, the choral perfection of the mob. Second, they think to themselves, “Boy, I better not miss the next hole.” In Massachusetts this is called, “driver education,” and it’s a life-long process.
You see, Baystate drivers educate one another on proper rotary etiquette through the generous use of their horns, fingers, and not so gentle taps on the bumper. Rotaries are to Massachusetts what watering holes are to the Serengeti, and the old herd animals teach the young: You don’t timidly creep to the water lest you be a crocodile’s lunch. It’s survival of the fittest, get in and get out, and maybe you’ll survive to try again your luck upon the morrow.
Stand by a Massachusetts rotary long enough and you will see beauty in motion, metal woven through time and space without room between bumpers to fit even a honk. You will see the dance of survival in all its forms, from ailing, smoke-spewing stragglers forced from the traffic stream, to motorists pushing dead cars off the road with their own car– despite the driver of the dead car frantically signaling that he doesn’t want his car rammed from behind and shoved off the road. Yes, it’s all about the love and trust down in glorious Massachusetts. But, with every dent you grow as a driver.
Now in Vermont, we got none of that, and it’s because Vermonters are too polite, and it’s a serious problem. Do you think a Baystater would hesitate to honk at a timid grandmother holding everybody up waiting for her engraved invitation to go? Of course not. No, Vermonters just don’t care enough about driving perfection to honk at the elderly, and we all pay the price for this selfishness.
In Massachusetts, by contrast, you’re never too old to get honked at. It’s tough love, but somebody has to care about perfection and to clarify, driving perfection in Massachusetts consists of a pack of 30 cars going 20 over the speed limit with every car almost touching three other cars.
Vermonters just don’t aspire to this same perfection. Their idea of driving perfection is surviving the winter in the beater they bought in November without putting more than 100 dollars into it and then selling it at a profit with 3,000 more miles on it come spring. It is, alas, a gulf in understanding. To love a rotary like a Masshole, you must value time more than your own wellbeing. Again, Vermonters are fighting an uphill battle to become rotary-efficient drivers.
Rotaries require blinkers. Vermonters don’t. Personally I think it’s because Vermonters don’t think that where they’re heading is anybody else’s business, and if they don’t use blinkers themselves, why would they ever trust someone else’s blinker? They don’t. No Vermonter has ever trusted any other driver’s blinker ever.
Don’t believe it? Go sit on Brown’s Trace Road in Jericho at the stop sign between the high school and the Town Hall. Be one car behind a Vermonter. Watch the car coming down the hill from the village use his blinker to denote he’s heading right, not in your path. Watch the Vermonter watch the car with the blinker descend that whole hill, 20 seconds it takes that car, and watch that Vermonter never even contemplate pulling out, trusting his fellow motorist, using blinkers to infer intent, speeding up driving times for all. Not gonna happen.
Maybe Vermonters don’t trust strangers, or maybe they just don’t trust rotaries. How can they when the biggest one in the state is Winooski’s version of a particle collider?
The Winooski roundabout could have been designed worse. It would have taken a few million more dollars and another year or two, but I’m confident we could have made it less conducive to smooth navigation.
Before we bite off more than we can chew, let’s just consider how daunting a task it would be to make it worse. What’s the first way to ruin a rotary? Easy: Have it not be round. Done. How else can we ruin a rotary? Build it in the exact shape of a race track, but install two red lights in each of the straightaways. Done. Top that. Easy: have the red lights be immediately responsive to any person who wanders by and wonders what happens if they push the button. Done. Next. Drape the non-circular, racetrack-shaped rotary with red lights up and down a hill. Done. Next. Build some large wall-like structure in the median of the rotary so that no one can see across it. Done. Next. Delineate the traffic lines and yield signs in such a way that you’d need a lawyer to know when it’s your turn. Done. Next. Build a series of strange, extra lanes which have stop signs that confuse the drivers into thinking they can pull out into the rotary traffic whenever they feel like it. Easy. Done. And lastly, after millions are spent on planning and design, have the locals at the last minute reverse the planned direction of two of the one-ways that lead to or from the rotary, negating tens of thousands spent on planning. Done and done.
Yes, it’s true; the Winooski rotary’s ineffectuality is an engineering marvel, a testament to the heights of underachievement achievable when the bureaucratic forces of local, state, and federal government attempt to make three lefts into a right.
Now that we understand the challenge, can we make it worse? Well, we could have it go clockwise and lead into the river; that would leave us with two cross-walks, eight wrongs, four rights, rotary traffic heading the opposite direction as Nascar and flushing the same way as our toilets, the British, and the Quebecois, and ultimately winding up in Lake Champlain like so much phosphorus and Burlington sewage, and what could be more wrong than that?
